Partying Inside a Giant Air Balloon at New Museum’s Ideas City

The New Museum brings artists, city planners, scientists, and builders, together for a series of surprising events.

June 1, 2015, 2:45pm

Standing inside a giant balloon, Bob Holman, poet and the proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, says, “Think of us in an invisible city,” opening his arms wide to the crowd, “in here we are a city within a city." He welcomes guests as the master of ceremonies of the Performative Conference in Nine Acts from 7:30PM to 3AM, one of the many interactive art events of The New Museum's Ideas City Festival.

Created in 2008 as a way to re-insert art and culture into the city during the recession, Ideas City brings together artists, city planners, scientists, builders and any New Yorker who happens to be walking down the Bowery, for a series of panel discussions, interactive art events, and street festivals. “It’s a multidimensional animal,” says Andrew Gori, an artist and creator of the Spring Break Art Show, and a helping hand in securing neighborhood spaces for the events. This year, the theme for Ideas City is "Invisible City," and no better way to kick off a night of poetry, performance, dance and art than inside of Barcelona-based artist Jordi Enrich Jorba’s Wind Igloo, a magical space made from a repurposed hot air balloon.

Image courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Daniel Levin

“I wanted to make something that could appear and disappear in a second,” Jorba explains of the installation which was set up inside St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mulberry street in SoHo. Entering the space brings out giddy childhood feelings of being inside a secret fort or a circus, with Holman standing on a large podium in the center as the ringleader for the night. Releasing a scroll that reached the ground, Holman begins what he prefaced as “the longest Haiku in history.” The poem speaks of the city outside these thin colorful walls and of all the things we love and hate about it; a place “waiting for life to start to decay.” The audience cheers along inside the mini ecosystem, living in a temporary rainbow womb that is both a universe away from New York and within the heart of it.

As the end of the poem nears, Holman’s cadence quickens, his arms gesturing wildly. In one sudden moment the rainbow walls disappear as the balloon crumples to the floor, revealing the large room we were in all along and a line of musicians playing on stage. “It’s tomorrow! It’s a mess!” he sings. “The only possible answer is…YES!”