The Miracle on George Green

On view daily from 7–10:45pm

Working across cinema and installation, Onyeka Igwe creates non-fiction films that use text, images, and film from historical archives to shift the maps of how we understand the past and the present. Igwe’s films unfoldlike figure eights, led through music, performance, and mesmerizing voice-overs. Using a forensic lens, Igwe draws audiences into individual and shared stories that expand onto a multiplicity of narratives, rather than a singular, reductive history.

Onyeka Igwe presents the second commission in High Line Originals, a format for realizing new video artworks. The Miracle on George Green tells a collective social history of the UK tradition of the commons—land collectively owned and used to gather, play, and debate. The film centers around the George Green treehouse in East London. In the early 1990s, when the old sweet chestnut tree that housed the treehouse was threatened, a group of schoolchildren wrote letters to the treehouse as part of a campaign to save it. From this story, Igwe’s film expands outward through archival materials from other social collective sites: Diggers of the 17th century, radical summer camps in Upstate New York in the 1930s and 40s, anti-war protests of Greenham Common in the 1980s, squatting communities of road protest camps in the 1990s, and the outdoor raves of the 2000s. Igwe’s vision of the past and potential futures for the commons is particularly welcome on the High Line, a space built for connection and communality.

Organized by Melanie Kress, Curator of High Line Art.