Throughout time, landscape has been a repository for collective and individual affection.

Something important happened at a given site. Revisiting that site becomes revisiting that moment – an instance when time and space collide. More precisely, two moments in time merge through the experience of a site. Meaningful sites become destinations for individual pilgrimage; some important locations become cult sites for whole communities, where monuments are erected and identity is enshrined. Gettysburg in the United States, Waterloo in Belgium and Batalha in Portugal are integral to the identity of those who share their history and memory. 

Sites that are associated with events are often named after the event. In this case the very word that is used to refer to the event – its representation in language - brings to mind the site.  Site and event are thus united in language.

More complex and arbitrary forms of signification lie in the naming of
sites after events that happened elsewhere.  An examples of this is Trafalgar Square, London named after a major marine battle. Places are often named in memory of a distinguished individual , as in the George Washington Square,  a date (Ponte 25 de Abril in Portugal marks the date of the 1974 revolution), an urban feature that no longer exists (a wall erected by the founding  Dutch on Wall Street) , or even naming sites after other sites (New York was originally called New Amsterdam).

Distinct locations have the capacity to illicit associations with narrative, and this capacity, enhanced by the  deliberate use of names, has served society to solidify its deepest truths and bonds.

The concept leads us to the theme of my art project:

Why did New York name a section of its geography after the late president Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, himself a New Yorker ? What kind of narratives does his name and live bring to mind? Why is it that we now reduce Roosevelt's name to the acronym FDR, further abstracting the signifier, as its capacity to generate meaning is limited?  And why did New York chose to name after the New Deal president a marginal and indistinct highway, placed in the eastern edge of the island of Manhattan, away from the squares where its crowds walk, study, gather and think?