[email protected]
610 869 4712
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Street Road
725 Street Road Cochranville, PA 19330 

The Little Free Library
1016B Gap Newport Pike 
Cochranville, PA 19330
A(mobile)DRIFT
​aka the Art Bus 

September 7, 2024
Free, spaces limited.
​2-7pm
Email us to sign up for the wait list.

SCHEDULE
The bus meeting/dropoff point will be central, and will be announced soon.

Contributions will be installed next to those from 2019's A(mobile)DRIFT, through December 14, 2024.
Drawing on and adapting the Fluxus- and walking-art-inspired score City Centre by artists Clare Qualmann & Claire Hind, from their 2015 book Ways to Wander (Triarchy Press), A(mobile)DRIFT is an occasional Street Road participatory project of an observational drift between 'city' and 'country'.

First developed by artists Carol Maurer, Denise Holland, and Emily Artinian for Street Road at the Common Field Conference in Philadelphia in 2019, A(mobile)DRIFT sees its second iteration this September, 2024, as part of Street Road's Fall programming.

Participants ride together from Center City Philadelphia to Street Road, along the way making sketches, taking photographs, writing observations, while keeping in mind the score's prompts along the way:
City Centre, a score from Ways to Wander

Cities tend to start in the middle and spread outwards, thinning as they go. Most of us know this journey. There is a familiar phenomenology of departure: leaving the centre behind, the built environment starts to slacken off and the skyline opens out; the compacted intricacy of the streets unravels; the density of traffic eases and inching progress gives way to longer surges of movement; the barrage of advertising and signage falls off; the noise drops a notch or two, perhaps a certain tension too. None of this is uniform; the geography of most cities is too complex for that. Headed the other way, the city gathers itself together again and the scales of things shifts upwards until at some point we can say we are more or less in the middle of things. But where is that exactly, and how can we be sure? 

A(mobile)DRIFT, a variation

How do I know I’m leaving it behind?
What is there more or less of; what has dropped away or become apparent; what has changed?
Whose route are we following?
Are we adrift?
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​Mind the landscape.
Pictured above: participant photo contributions from A(mobile)DRIFT 2019, between Philadelphia and Street Road.

A(mobile)drift 2019

Participants' collected contributions from 'A(mobile)DRIFT' 2019.
​Contributions installed at Street Road.
Adding observations, en route.

Further background

One of Street Road's ongoing areas of interest is the querying of spatio-social binarizations – that is, distinctions such as 'urban/rural', 'urban/suburban' and the like. While useful for some, like planners and polsters, these categories become engrained to the point that we become blind to things like the 'rural' in spaces seen as cities and towns (for example the complex worlds of urban other-than-human beings), as well as the extreme urbanization of most of our planet – now extending to the deep seas and low-Earth orbit, and even the moon and neighboring planets – in the form of nation-state and private claims on these spaces (most often for extractive, capital-driven, and damaging ends).

A(mobile)DRIFT is a space and process for moving through, considering, and re-considering these divisions and categorizations together. 

​The 2019 iteration of this work was created in connection to a panel convened by Street Road at the Common Field conference, description below. For further details about the panel, including presenters' notes, etc. contact us.​
Reconsidering Place: troubling the urban/rural binary for artist practices and organizations
Saturday, April 27, 2019 | 10–11:30 AM
Commonfield – Report from the Field
Organized by Emily Artinian and Fawn Daphne Plessner, Street Road with presentations by Emily Artinian, Fawn Daphne Plessner, Matthew Fluharty, and Emelie Chhangur. 

The field of art is framed by a normative belief that urban spaces constitute a ‘center’ of cultural endeavors and that rural spaces are at the ‘periphery’. This imaginary is increasingly challenged by concepts that ambiguate conventional understandings of the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’, as well as framings such as the 'suburban' or 'exurban'.
 
Such designations do not capture the variegated social and cultural spaces that have become visible in recent decades, comprised as they are of axes of relationships and mobilities amongst multiple places and that also intersect with online spaces. Such designations also serve to reify place through colonial vocabularies and concepts and thereby reinforce not only the racialization and industrialization of space but also leave out important indigenous concepts and relations to place. They also sustain immobilities, even as mobility and access is increasingly assumed.

This session draws out speakers’ and attendees’ perspectives to examine working in multiple in-betweens, aiming to raise new questions about the cogency of claims to centrality and marginality.

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VISITING
Please check our website or social media before visiting as our hours are subject to change.

Street Road HOURS
Autumn 2024 hours info: Our hours are currently by appointment, in person or virtually. 
We can accommodate most times, given advance notice. 
And, stop by if you see a car outside!
Email us or phone to set up a visit

Little Free Library - Fall 2024 HOURS
Mondays 6-9pm
Wednesdays 6-9pm
Thursdays 12-4pm
Fridays 10am-2pm
Saturdays 10am-2pm
and by appointment.
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Our Little Free Library outdoor boxes at both sites are open 24/7 and are regularly restocked.

Please call 610-869-4712 or email to set up visits outside our regularly scheduled hours. 
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We are currently seeking volunteers for both locations: email us to enquire. We look forward to hearing from you!

DIRECTIONS
to Street Road here.
to The Little Free Library here.

A word about 'here':
We acknowledge that we are on the ancestral lands of the Lenape, original people of the mid-Atlantic area, forced west by British and US governments. Most Delaware Indian tribe descendants are now located in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Lenni Lenapes in Pennsylvania are not officially recognized as tribes by the United States, though an estimated 5000 Lenape Nation descendants live in the Delaware River area. We pay respects to the Lenape people both past and present. Please consider the many legacies of violence, displacement and settlement that form part of our collective histories. While increased public recognition of these legacies and processes of redress such as Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission are positive steps, concrete focus on return of land and land rights remains a distant horizon.
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