RJ Chronicles #1 - Projects, People & Places We Love
Our Rockajoint team has been on the go lately, meeting great people and learning about their projects.
- Rockajoint's Haydeé exploring in Brooklyn - We kick-started our journey in Berlin with a new series of events we are organizing called Meet Collaborators - essentially the offline version of Rockajoint.com, a place for project-based networking, sharing ideas and recruiting collaborators. There we met Vanessa Brazeau and the Berlin version of Art Spin, “a bicycle-led art crawl of creative venues, art performances, and site-specific installations” throughout various neighborhoods of the city - originally founded in Toronto, Canada by Rui Pimenta, Casey Hinton and Layne Hinton. Our venue host, Renata Faccenda of Aviatrix Atelier, shared her open call for collaborators in her Zwei Stunden Mit community workshop project taking place at Aviatrix in Berlin already.
- Renata Faccenda at Meet Collaborators, Aviatrix Atelier Berlin -
Next stop was Brooklyn, New York! Oh, the joy of walking about in neighborhoods packed with culture, history, all sorts of people to meet and places to enjoy. With only a couple of days, we had to pick wisely in the vastness and wonders of NYC. So, we did Williamsburg, a neighborhood in constant change, full of interesting people, stories and corners. We experienced Williamsburg in a wonderful way thanks to the work of Shannon Carroll, Jen Epstein, Andrew Hinton and Federica Sasso with their project Southside Stories. An audio tour led a group of us through a few streets, where we heard interviews with locals and their stories. The tour ended at the Caribbean Club, or otherwise known as Toñita’s, the last Puerto Rican Social club in South-side Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the subject of Toñita’s, an award winning documentary by Sebastian Diaz and Beyza Boyacioglu. An amazing place, the Caribbean Club offers food, music, love and smiles to anyone who walks in. We shall return.
We saw several sides of Williamsburg, including a little glimpse of the startup world at a cool coworking space called The Yard. They’ve got several locations in NYC and offer their clients a variety of amenities and a high quality work environment. We met with Mozy, the glue and charm of the Williamsburg The Yard community.
- Mozy Shamah, facility manager at The Yard Williamsburg -
Our short trip ended with a spontaneous visit to the Brooklyn Art Library, which “houses the Sketchbook Project, a crowd-sourced library that features 31,401 artists' books contributed by creative people from 135+ countries.“ They do collaboration and are a great example of how the arts can also do business and positive social impact!
- Annie, the lovely librarian at Brooklyn Arts Library -
Our on-the go-ness has now brought us to the San Diego & Tijuana mega region where we plan to meet more awesome people and keep learning of great initiatives. We are hosting a Meet Collaborators event next thursday, August 28 in Tijuana at Café Sabina. Please visit Meetcollaborators.com for more info and details.
Stay in tune for news, and a huge huge thanks to all our hosts and supporters along the way!
- For questions or remarks on anything related to this article, please contact Haydeé Jiménez -