All right. And then just I'm staying on time
. I'm going to get started and hi everyone.
I'm Leslie Mathews, I'm the art and architecture librarian
here at Virginia Tech on behalf of the cost diversity
committee and our intersections team. I'm thrilled to welcome
you all here to the art and architecture library for
our first intersections, panel discussion on social justice and
the built environment. I would like to thank our
three panelists for sharing their time ideas with us and
being willing to embark on this new journey with us
together. If I may, I would like to
read a few words I found inspiring an apt today
as we begin this conversation series. What are the
conversations that we need to have as families, as
communities as a nation? Can we commit ourselves at
this critical juncture to a future that includes each other
? Can we build communication for the person next to
us? Can we not wait for someone somewhere else
to do our work for us? Most importantly,
let us not run from this moment and that is
from thai fab high of deer park monastery in California
and now I will hand it off to Sharon Tomer
. It's just Thomert, sorry, assistant professor of
architecture and my co lead on this new intersections initiative
. She'll be moderating today's panel. She's going to
start us off by framing the discussion. Thank you
Sharon. Yeah, well thank you all so much
for coming. We're very excited and we hope that
this is gonna be the first of a series of
ongoing conversations. Um intersections is intended to be an
interdisciplinary effort that's organized from the College of Architecture and
Urban Studies. But we want to bring together individuals
from disciplines all across the campus plus the university,
the region maybe even beyond what we're hoping is to
generate conversation that's very broadly about social justice and we
hope to really kind of explore and define what that
term might mean. Different ways we can understand it
, different realms within which it operates and how social
justice relates to the built environment. And our goal
is to bring together people that work very directly in
the built environment. So planners, architects, landscape
architects, interior architects, but bring those together with
other people from very different disciplines whose work either touches
upon or somehow grounded in the built environment in very
different ways. Um So what we've decided is we're
gonna theme each one of these sessions, today's theme
is the local. And so we've asked our three
panelists to somehow discuss the local through their work.
Um And so now I'd like to just go and
introduce our panelists. The first personally speaking today is
Erica. Erica is a poet, a professor in
the english department and the director of the M.
F. A. Program and creative writing. She's
authored four award winning poetry and poems have been published
widely. Her poetry brings together some of the Um
themes related to gender and to those are very sort
of everyday experiences of 21st century. Our next speaker
will be Michael Borovsky. Michael is a new professor
in studio art in the School of Visual Arts here
. Um has used his work uses photography, installation
and performance to investigate how societal values get embedded in
the design of urban environments. Um And his projects
explore the blurring of public and private life and they
touch on themes of migration, intimacy, sexuality,
identity in rural towns. And then our third Panelist
today is see elbow Hannah cl is a professor in
landscape architecture in the school of Architecture Design. Um
And his research focuses on the relationship between landscape architecture
and issues such as environmental justice, community history and
identity. Um and this research and his teaching is
very much embedded in community engaged design. So,
I mean I have callous organized, we're gonna be
organizing. This is we've asked each of them to
speak briefly just a little bit. Um and then
I'm going to sort of start a conversation between them
and you were throwing out a couple of questions and
then we're going to open it up so everyone can
have questions. So the idea is that this is
very much a conversation, so okay. Um Hi
everyone, I'm gonna start off by reading a poem
and then I'm going to talk a little bit about
the connection found um to some issues of the local
and social justice. Um I've been living in Blacksburg
for 10 years, I've been attacked for 10 years
, but I'm originally from New York. Um and
my work is informed by that um sort of weird
dislocation of being in Appalachia, but not of it
in some way, but also of it because I've
been here for so long. one of the things
I try to do in my work is really think
about what are the things normally as a poet or
a writer that might get ironed out of poetry.
Um one of the things I feel very strongly about
is that while we live in a theoretically beautiful area
where I end up having my epiphanies um or the
places I seem to spend the most time, partially
because I have okay much like this, which if
you lived here long enough you probably went in your
way me bed bath and beyond are staples in Christiansburg
, which is very much different from the pastoral surroundings
that were also in um, this poem is called
walmart Supercenter and everything in it. Um actually took
place in walmart around the country in a week long
period, a few years ago, walmart Supercenter.
God bless America says the bumper sticker on the racer
, red rascal scooter that accidentally cuts me off in
the walmart parking lot After a guy in a tricked
out jeep with rims like chrome pinwheels, tries to
pick me up by honking all before I make it
past the automatic doors, waiting to accept my unwashed
hair, my flip flops, my lounge pants,
The old man on the scooter waves, sports a
straw boater banded in blue and white and may or
may not be the official greeter, but everyone here
sure is friendly. Even the faces of plastic bags
which wink yellow and crinkle with kindness sounds like applause
when they brushed the legs of shoppers, carrying them
to their cars in port charlotte, A woman's body
was found in a Jetta in a walmart parking lot
In a Walmart parking lot in Springfield. Um,
a cock monkey named Charlie attacked an eight year old
girl. I am a walmart shopper attract house dweller
. The developments, you can see clearly from every
highway in America that's not jammed up on farmland or
pinned in by mountains. I parked my car at
a slant in the lot, hug tight by my
neighbors pickups. I drive my enormous heart through the
aisles and fill it with pampers, tube socks,
juice boxes, fruit in the parking lot of the
Mcallen walmart, A woman tried to sell six bengal
tiger cubs to a group of mexican day laborers.
A man carjacked a woman in the parking lot of
the west Mifflin walmart then ran under a bridge and
disappeared, which is to say that the world we
expect to see, look hewn from wood is maybe
two lanes wide has readily identifiable produce and the one
we've got instead has jackknifed itself on the side of
the interstate and keep skidding. The one we've got
has clouds traveling so fast across the sky. It's
like they're tied to an electric current. But electricity
is the same for everybody. It comes in the
top of your head and goes out your shoes,
which will walk through these automatic doors in the Corbyn
walmart parking lot. A woman with a small amount
of cash was arrested for getting in and out of
trucks. A man stepped out of his car in
the columbus walmart parking lot and shot himself. I
get in the checkout line behind a lighted number on
a pole. The man in front of me jangles
coins in his pocket, rocks back and forth on
his heels. The girl in front of him carefully
peels four moist dimes from her palm to pay for
a small container of honey mustard dipping sauce in the
parking lot of the Laffey at walmart, grandparents left
their disabled two year old grandson sitting in a shopping
cart and drove away Employees in the parking lot.
At the Lagrange Walmart found a box containing seven abandoned
Kittens. I am not a christian, are prone
to idioms, but when the cashier says she is
grateful for small mercies and nods in assent, curia
, Molaison, Christie, Molaison. The latin root
of mercy means price paid wages, merchandise, though
now we use it as compassion, shown to a
person in a position of powerlessness, and sometimes forgiveness
towards a person with no right to claim it.
God is merciful and gracious, but not just in
the walmart parking lot in Stockton, A man considered
armed and dangerous, attacked his wife, beating her
unconscious. A couple tried to sell their six month
old for$25 to buy meth in the Salinas walmart
parking lot. We who are in danger? Remember
mercy has a human heart. Mercy with her tender
mitigations slow to anger and great in loving kindness with
her. Blue employees smoke emblazoned with how may I
help you? Someone in this place? Have mercy
on us. No. My colleagues joke that my
time okay to talk for like a couple of minutes
. Yeah, one minute talk for one minute.
Okay. So my colleagues joke that I'm the poet
laureate of walmart because I wrote an entire book where
I basically went on the road with a documentary photographer
to Detroit, um to explore the seat of american
, the previous seat of american capitalism, and our
habits of consumption and cast off. So I wrote
a whole book on ghost box stores, which are
abandoned big box stores, um but also about our
local walmart in Christiansburg and the interactions I had there
. Because I'm really interested in, first of all
what the most un poetic place on earth is.
So aside from a gas station bathroom, which I
have a few poems about that in here, to
um it was walmart and I'm really interested in the
ways in which it's been kind of demonized, but
also makes up a big part of where americans tend
to spend their time, and in big box stores
in general, and how generic spaces in local places
can hold really concrete and specific and personal narratives.
And so I am very much invested in the idea
that I can create art out of generic built environment
spaces that are the same everywhere, but are specific
to this place and can construct some kind of narrative
of social justice when the personal and political are tied
together and when we ourselves implicate ourselves in any place
that we're a part of. Yeah. Mhm.
Mhm. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Still
. Okay. Yeah. So I wanted to talk
about two bodies of work that I have completed over
the last two or three years. Um most recently
came from Western Wisconsin and I grew up in Albuquerque
New Mexico and I took a job claire Wisconsin.
And in the process of getting ready to go,
I hadn't really ever been there and I found myself
being feeling very anxious about um what what I imagine
to be kind of rural midwest culture and how I
was going to fit in there and feeling maybe uh
frightened or threatened kind of what I imagine to be
conservativism, I think both real and imagined conservativism of
the area. So kind of maybe along the same
lines as Erica in terms of un poetic. Oh
sure. In terms of Erica talking about un poetic
places, I was really interested in this idea of
eyesores, the kinds of places in a community that
everyone agrees are ugly or bad. Um and what
those values mean in terms of how we see ourselves
. So the first thing that kind of gave me
gave me hope in moving to rural Wisconsin was this
building um which I came across driving down a highway
kind of as the sun was setting. And I
saw this kind of bright pink, neon pure pleasure
, sort of like illuminating the path. Uh two
basically just changing my mind about what I thought um
that that kind of conservative place was going to be
. So, so I kind of uh I liked
this, this place of deviancy and um kind of
like an alternative space which many people saw as an
eyesore. I decided to start photographing them. So
as I was traveling around, I would try to
always stop if I, I saw any kind of
highway signs for for sex shop. Um, I
kind of also the more that I saw the more
interest I got in both the language of the names
of the stores and some of the aesthetics of the
calligraphy and there's kind of a lot, a lot
that I could say about the design that goes into
some of these places. Um, and also thinking
about where they were located in terms of city planning
. I came across this uh, the greek root
of obscene means offstage and that seemed to fit very
well with these, which are always kind of tucked
away behind a gas station. Um, someplace sort
of like where they weren't going to be seen by
the general public, but the result was, they
were often kind of beautiful natural surroundings. So I
kind of, rather than photographed them as these ugly
eyesores, I kind of wanted to elevate them a
little bit. Um, it was a project like
I said, I started in Wisconsin and initially had
kind of framed it as um, midwest sex shops
. And I after coming here, I feel like
there's potential for it to continue. So I'm just
kind of think of it as small town sex shops
. Um, this is uh, this is actually
from Blacksburg Georgia. I didn't know existed until I
was driving through Georgia, but it's uh, it's
kind of one of the newer editions to this series
. So, so this body of work, I
think for me was kind of seeing another side to
my imagine imagination of rural midwest. And um,
this other project that I worked on, I think
is much more maybe the other side or the way
that a rural or small town self identifies. Um
, these are from a yearly event that happens in
Chippewa Falls called christmas village, where they kind of
closed down their public park and fill it with string
lights. And there's like, it's very snowy,
so like people can walk through. And as I
was going through it, I saw these painted backdrops
and there were all these kind of Uh nostalgic kind
of kitschy architectural buildings, mostly on like four x
8 plywood. Um so this is made up of
3, 4 x eight plywood sheets and a few
little like lamps clamped on. And I found them
both uh, really intriguing and also really disturbing.
Um, the kind of this kind of like a
rhetoric of make America great again, I think was
really sort of coming through in these fantasy spaces that
populate the christmas village, the imaginary place that is
christmas village. So this, uh, I made
a series of photographs of these where I really just
wanted to kind of zoom in on the surface of
the painted backdrop um, to kind of show the
facade or maybe, uh, make make the fact
that this is a painted object very clear but also
indicate that it is a photograph through shallow depth of
field around the edges. The kinds of buildings are
like, they kind of hit some, some generic
types of building. So there's a bank, there's
a school. The last one was, the stadium
is a few different houses. A few of them
are kind of like local historical sites from Wisconsin,
but most of them are more, more types of
buildings. Yeah, so this is one of the
, the house is because this is the kind of
house that people live in, in uh, in
christmas village. Um, not not the houses that
people live in in Chippewa Falls, but maybe someday
we'll get back to back to that place. Uh
, so, so I thought I would talk about
these two bodies of work is that they're, they're
both about me kind of reckoning with what, what
uh, what are the values of a rural identity
or a small town? And how does that come
through in the built environment? I think one was
sort of my own need to see a little bit
of something bad or something kind of uh deviant in
the space and sort of appreciating that it was there
. You know, if you look hard enough you
can see that um coming through. And I think
the other one was very much about what uh me
wondering what this small town values means and how it
comes through in uh architecture and in kind of the
creation of space, whether that's real or fictional.
Yeah, I think that's kind of culture for me
. It's thank you. Yeah, stand up.
So my voice can go, this is a stream
of consciousness. So please bear with me. I
just wrote it down because I remember everything. Um
, so we all interact with the built environment as
humans and as a landscape architect. Landscape is my
fundamental media, social and cultural aspects of design and
the built environment make up much of the work that
many of us do, and more uh specifically the
local, uh, when we start from a broad
, broad understanding of it as a way of thinking
and problem. Problema ties ng some of the systemic
social and environmental pressures uh, communities face. It
is sad to say that that race and class are
good indicators of where you will find some of the
ugly scars in the landscape. Power plants, waste
facility, waste management facilities, gasoline storage facilities,
uh, contaminant landscapes. The list can go on
and on. Oftentimes these same, these same areas
are uh, also uh, places where there it's
unfair allocation of parks and green spaces, sidewalks and
access to healthy food options. These land use decisions
created the hostile conditions that often lead to problems like
obesity, diabetes and asthma. These scars and voids
uh, in some of our most vulnerable communities are
inseparable in many ways. And I hope that social
and environmental perspective on the return to the local,
which is what we're talking about today uh will highlight
this interconnectedness and will raise some critical questions about um
how humans, how the human nature relationship may be
considered, or reconsidered as it were in the age
of environmental and social crisis. We're about design and
planning policies that seek to remediate the effects of oppression
, neglect and marginalization. So, when we talk
about a return, the first thought is a return
from where and perhaps more, more so where is
it uh that we are heading, where we going
. It is here that I would like to introduce
the concept of the multiplicity of locality. By this
. I mean that we must have a fundamental understanding
of the fundamental understanding of the constellation of the local
right that makes up the fabric of a place.
2016 has been a very eventful year in terms of
bringing uh to the forefront social environmental issues which have
always been there running in the background, even if
they go unrecognized. For example, the ongoing protests
over the Dakota access pipeline, the mass movement of
people as a result of environmental stressors and the fact
that the paris climate agreement is thrown into uncertainty after
yesterday's election results. Yeah, uh, this demonstrates
to us that the way that we think about the
relationship between design and social justice should be a major
part of the work that we're doing in design.
So, within this, again, the understanding of
the local being made up of many parts, and
quite frankly, I look at the local as a
fractal, as you zoom in. You look at
community networks, all of these, all of these
layers and processes revealed um, in many ways the
frames and players that make up look uh local communities
and things that we need to be aware of as
community designers um when we go through design processes.
Um so here within the work that I do all
for community engagement as a critical response to political,
social economic forces that disproportionately impact marginalized community. For
me, community engagement that is disruptive is key.
I'm not talking about total chaos in the streets,
but the disruption that is meant to challenge a breakdown
the systemic barriers that affect our communities, disruptive engagement
engagement, excuse me, must first and foremost,
challenge the dominant discourses that have enabled redlining food deserts
and overall lack of access to healthy to a healthy
environment. And we can do this by developing some
tools offered to us by scholars of resistance, such
as Paulo free Air, who advocated for the use
of education against power structures. He argued that we
should come together to educate, learn and talk something
that many of us feel is fundamental to address the
root causes of social injustice rather than simply to attend
to. The symptoms. Often use stories and the
power of storytelling to disrupt marginalization in community engagement,
particularly course stories and future stories as catalyst for change
course stories. Uh, suggests that each person has
a core story that we can that were active in
creating as we live our lives. So in effect
, we become our stories. Future stories, on
the other hand, allows communities to take steps back
, take steps from the future, back to the
present in which they discuss missions. Heritage, heritage
is disasters, triumphs and pitfalls through a narrative process
. Excuse me, I found it important to utilize
stories in creative ways to tell, uh, to
listen and to invent stories as well as, um
, the equally important ability to make space for stories
to be heard, thus thus challenging the dominant power
structures in society. So, for example, some
of the work that I'm doing it in roanoke,
uh this community engagement work um has taken a form
of six community gardens, three of which myself,
my research lab have led the engagement efforts to better
understand it's better understand the needs of community members when
it comes to design and planning a garden that not
only produces food for the community, but also serves
as a as a viable community green space. So
I will in here what they're looking to the future
of the efforts that are going on roanoke. In
terms of community resilience, I work now is focusing
on resilient food infrastructure by looking at relationships with vacancy
and food insecurity. Um and to bring this back
to the local, um There are 200 food deserts
in the Commonwealth of Virginia. 29 of those have
100 no access for those are located and roll it
up okay for that's pretty, that's a pretty big
deal. Um Out of the four tracks that there
are 100 low access to food if you overlay vacancy
with that, all of them are at either at
risk threatened or hazardous in terms of the impact of
vacancy on these communities. So now this semester,
my students, we worked with uh some other scientists
over in the bio complex institute. We've developed an
app where we can start to develop a catalogue of
vacancy uh to help better you instead of looking at
vacancy as a negative for trying to use it as
a positive. And so we're actually empowering residents with
their cell phones to go out and actually help us
create an inventory of vacancy that we can better understand
impacts that neglect has in the neighborhood. But not
to cry was spilled milk for milk, we're gonna
do something about it. Um So those wonderful thank
you so much, but I thought I'd do is
um just start this off by um throwing out not
really so much a question. Just an observation of
some threats that I noticed between all three. Um
And one of the things, there's a couple of
things that I think really jump out that are in
common between, but how old have you seen the
world? Um and read um the environment and act
upon it. And one of them is sort of
this idea of dis junctures, things contradictions, those
things which um either like Erica said, the sort
of things that are ironed out, which often are
unseen or the silent voices or um the kind of
spaces of deviancy. There's this similar thread in all
three of these kind of spaces of contradictions and practices
that are very contradictory. These things that rub up
against each other. Um But what I think is
really interesting is that um in a way, if
we look at all three talks, there's a discourse
in the way that these three, but I think
because of your disciplinary backgrounds um view the world,
so you see similar environments, but it's about whether
or not one reads the visual or read the performative
, so how people behave in space, the things
that people do in space, or the structure of
how spaces are made. Um I think is what
each of you sort of pays attention to. So
I wondered if you could just sort of talk about
where you see overlaps and connections between each of your
projects ways of working what you notice? Well,
start. So I think the work that I the
work maybe stand up. Okay. The work that
I showed is uh probably some of the more documentary
photographic work that I've done. And um I sort
of have a practice that's in that context and in
that in that sense it's very much an imagined space
or I guess it's a visual visual space. So
the design, the look of something is really important
, but it kind of it exists as like it's
out in the world somewhere else and the person who
sees it can kind of imagine what that space is
like. And but I do kind of say every
three or four years I like to make something that
is a little bit more performative and something where people
actually have a physical interaction with an object. Um
so I think that's that's something I've kind of balanced
or found a balance for in my own practice is
the the interaction with the work that is purely photographic
and then uh having some sort of kind of physical
thing that people move around or have a phenomenal logical
experience with in real time. Yeah. Yes.
So one of the things that I did relieve get
a chance to talk about in line 30 seconds ago
. So yeah, so a lot of the work
that I'm interested in as, you know, as
an african american landscape, I'll just be quite honest
with you. I've seen the, you know,
disproportionality in marginalized communities. And so for me,
for me not to do something about that is wrong
. So that's why I position myself as someone that
um can work with communities lived in communities like this
. I see the effects. I grew up in
Memphis. I mean there's a lot, a lot
of history there that if you read the history books
, it's one side in the landscape architect Island have
to work with Wendy. And my Master's degree is
that it opens your eyes up to the way the
city works in a much different way. And so
I try to do that in the classroom as well
as the community. So it's about uh being transformative
in the design process, but also involved in the
public. And so it's not, it's not from
the notion of to placate to inform that this is
what we're gonna do for your community. It's like
we have tools that can help, we're not the
experts. Um we understand that knowledge doesn't just flow
down this great campus. Community members have knowledge as
well. It's much different than the knowledge we have
. You take those two bodies of knowledge and put
them together. We can actually do something very positive
with that. And so that's where all of the
work, but I do comes into that. And
also for the students that I work with in order
for me, in order to make change in design
, we can teach our students the same practices that
we're teaching them years ago. We have to be
transformative, we have to do about this. And
so a lot of the work that our students will
be, the concept they'll be working with will not
look like them given the shift in demographics of America
. So we need to teach them, you know
, in part as part of design education that the
other is, is happening, but the other doesn't
mean negativity, right? We could be inclusive in
the process comes from, that's really helpful. actually
, I'm going to talk about the other for a
minute. Um so and also the visual and performative
. So um what I read is just a little
piece of some of the stuff I work on.
My two most recent big projects are, so I've
been going on the road with documentary photographers. The
last big project I did was actually for Virginia Quarterly
Review. I went on the road to the Republican
National Convention in Cleveland and reported on the city and
verse with a war photographer who had just gotten back
from the South Sudan and also Afghanistan. Um and
we created a project based on interviewing hundreds of people
in the city of Cleveland that was actually on the
city during the convention and dealt with the um predominantly
african american community in Cleveland and East Cleveland. Um
and went to spaces during the convention that people didn't
go to who are part of the convention, but
also interviewed delegates. Um, The project to me
today seems much more sinister than I did when I
first created it. So it has a really different
life, but I guess I just say um I've
been working more and more in documentary modes because I
feel they're really important. The other project I've been
working on um with a public health photojournalist is going
to gun shows and interviewing my neighbors about their guns
. Um, and trying to figure out how firearms
and gun violence kind of have been viewed this community
since I've been here because I started right after the
shootings. Um I'm teaching a class in the spring
called art and social transformation. That's really an art
and social justice course. Um and so I'm hoping
to bring some of those things together, but taking
on large social issues by interviewing people and interviewing people
often that are close to me who have very different
viewpoints and trying to figure out a way the writer
Dorothy Allison, who is a queer um Southern writer
once talked about the way to change people's minds is
to really get into their hearts and crack it open
through stories through empathy, because I'm a poet and
because I work in a medium that in some senses
is the closest um to architecture as far as literature
goes, because poems have bodies and no matter where
you take them across the page, they keep their
form. They have scaffolding. The word for stanza
comes from the italian word for room. Um I
very much think of poems as physical spaces, as
physical places. Um but a lot of my work
is informed by imagery of place and by architectural theory
and by, you know, like in some senses
, the walmart poem I read is informed by ethnologist
Marcaggi and his idea of non you and robert smithson's
monuments of Passaic and a lot of other things that
you wouldn't think it is. Um but my way
of tying that back to ideas of social justice and
the local is by trying to figure out this idea
of what feels most other to me and entering it
in really visceral and really sometimes narrative, sometimes lyric
ways. Thanks. I think I could keep talking
and talking. Um, I could keep going and
going, but with lots of questions and observations.
But I should, we'd like to open this up
because I wanted this to be a conversation with everyone
. So if anyone has questions, comments and they
can all start talking together, that'll be great.
We don't have a best friend. We didn't think
this would, since anyone would like to ask a
question or make a comment. Yeah. Have a
question. Looking for air. You sit here,
is there? Yeah. Mm. When you think
you were talking about walmart structures, words in the
story, do you think that structures like physical structures
and places you have there narrative or is it just
Yeah, better. Yeah. So one of the
things that inspired me to start writing about big box
stores was actually a website. Um, well the
project by photographer brian ulrich, um, called copia
, which I named my book after. And one
of the things that he actually photographs is something called
a label scar, which is when you take the
signage off a building. Um, the part behind
the sign that hasn't been weathered that has a different
patina than the rest of the building is actually called
the labels car. So it's like this, this
weird marker of what the building used to be no
matter how you, your purposes. Um, I
later found out there's a website by that name called
labels car that collects people's individual memories around dead malls
. Place at malls are shut down those boxes and
so it'll be like hundreds of people going online to
talk about how they lost their virginity and like the
orange Julius in a mall in Overland Park Kansas,
that's like Close has been closed for 20 years.
And so I think it's like kind of both.
And the space itself obviously kind of absorbs this energy
and has this wear and tear on it and these
markers that very much um, create, I can
create an imaginary narrative or I can tell an actual
narrative of the space because I'm an artist. I
get to do both of those things in any way
I want um through figurative language or other ways.
Um but I think that that to me is almost
is sometimes inextricable and sometimes not inextricable, you know
, like I can look at one of those structures
and completely put something that I feel at a time
when I'm looking at it on the structure, that
has nothing to do with the structure, or I
can look at the structure and try to report back
what I see in some way, shape or form
and how it makes me feel. Or I can
implant these narratives that are there, so it's like
all of the things. Mhm. Uh yeah,
I think, I guess I think design choices have
a narrative to them, and I'm really interested in
the the things like big box stores that don't seem
like they're very thought out and like how those,
but, but the fact that they all kind of
have the same design suggests to me that there is
a purpose behind their design. Um, as I
was thinking about it, I was thinking of the
, like this might be around targets, but there
was like a gigantic red orbs that hang out in
front of the building. So I don't know the
narrative behind that, but I'm convinced that there is
one. Yeah, yeah. So I'll take take
what you said in the parts of vacancy a lot
of times with thinking lots. I think it's just
there's nothing there. But that's a narrative that has
been placed on other standpoint a lot of times with
, uh, you know, I just don't think
about her park neighborhood that we did a garden in
ruins. The neighborhood has a lot of vacancy.
And if you talk to the kids it's like,
hey, you know, these three lots make up
our football field. So that's the whole narrative from
the kid's perspective that no this this because there's not
a building, there doesn't mean that the space doesn't
have stories that are tied to it. You can
talk to the older residents of the community. Yeah
. Sister soaring to live in this on this lot
. The house was torn down. But remember she
was a big in the church and she made the
best sweet potato pod in the neighborhood. And so
there's a lot of memory that's attached to vacant places
. So just because there's nothing there, there's always
there's layers to it. So that's where the story
is coming because you can actually get people to my
chest was killed. Uh huh. A lot of
people including designers believe are um believe that designers must
not uh huh. Any ship or begin social change
or. Yeah, but this project in Verona which
is so important to our present condition, social uh
economic and ecological, it's so completely integrated with design
. And you said you're working with scientists and I'm
sure biotechnology, I just want to know how it
was initiated in the city. Did the city approach
you guys, how did the project begin or how
did So we have a I have a rule for
my lab. We don't we don't go anywhere.
We're not invited. So we were invited into her
part community where that that project started to actually look
at um to vacant parcels that were is that kind
of the forefront of their community. And they wanted
to do a gateway and that's how that project started
. So it started from a gateway project during the
oral histories. And we realize that, you know
, there's a really close talk to, uh,
there was a lot of food memory is what we
call it, that was there. And so uh
the residents thought well we can do this Gateway,
but we also do a garden potentially because we have
all this vacant land, we can do stuff with
it. And so that's kind of how the discussion
started. But normally we like to be invited in
two communities. I've never tried to come from a
starting point of, I know more than you and
this is what you need the trial for questions.
It's not really interested in the comments read Between all
three of you about ideas of self and ideas of
who we are as communities and wrestling with right now
. Is that A. C. L. U
. Obviously nothing what you do, You obviously have
transformative vision that your work needs to lead to some
sort of community transformation. Um But I also think
Erica and Mark like mike that you have transformative visions
to in a way they're just a bit different from
the way Cl has articulated it. So where does
Thank you? Yeah. One I guess we maybe
my my thinking is because I don't often work often
more collaboratively. A lot of times. It is
like the self going out and figuring out these spaces
. Maybe because of that. I don't want to
like define a change. You know, I'm much
more interested in observing and sort of like presenting what
I'm observing and then like hopefully having conversations about what
I'm seeing. Um So I think maybe for me
it's like that kind of like a what Cl is
talking about and he's very conscious of collaboration and working
with the people who are on the ground and the
different kinds of knowledge that come together. Because I'm
not necessarily engaging in that. I don't know.
I don't think I have the answer No. It's
more just like things that I see would like to
comment on. I think one of the questions um
, a lot of us are wrestling with who,
who right, and particularly to write poetry right now
at this particular moment in time is what are the
limits of our medium most of us teach. And
so a lot of us do, um, our
social justice work in the classroom. Um, how
are actual artistic work engages in that project? I
mean like the project I'm working on now with guns
. The underlying question or thing I'm starting with is
biblical. Actually the biblical injunctions in Leviticus, you
should love your neighbor as yourself. And what does
that actually mean? And how do you wrangle with
that when you feel so other in a place?
Um separating my work from my personal background is really
complicated and almost impossible as a jew in rural southwest
Virginia who is part of a multiracial family, who
is the child of refugees and immigrants. Um it
to me the idea of dislocation and location is very
important and figuring it out um how that plays into
my vision for things. They're poets who create um
beauty in some senses through their work and use language
as a way to elevate. So, one project
I'm thinking of as a poet, Mark Doty in
the eighties, um wrote a book called my alexandria
about new york, where he specifically uses very elevated
diction to talk about um people who are dying of
AIDS. Um and people were homeless on the street
. And by using that language, he takes people
that at the time everybody was looking past and ignoring
and raises them up. Um, that's not my
project right now. In the future, I might
have a project like that, but I resist these
kind of endings that make everything um elevated in favor
of what I call like a sort of resistant ending
or pragmatism that, but I really believe that in
writing homes about something what you get. And I
think this is similar in some senses maybe to Michael's
work. Is there something about attention when you look
at, when you really look at something, it's
a form of blessing it, it's a form of
seeing it and when you see it, you can't
unsee it. And it means that sometimes you are
moved to action. There's complications in doing the kind
of documentary work I do with the question of who
gets to speak for whom is a really intense question
. And it's one that photojournalists have wrestled with a
lot longer than paul. It's I think. And
so that's why I like to go on the road
of photojournalists. Um, but I think that moment
of attention that artwork can provide is what um,
drives. I think that component of my work because
I don't go into communities through my art and do
that kind of social justice work. I do it
through my teaching. So, okay. Actually have
see all those pictures and Children in your, your
picture. Um, can you talk about your thoughts
about social justice and Children? Yeah, I can
give so for this for the hard part project,
we actually, I actually just talk to my students
about this today. I had a conversation kids yeah
, about where tomatoes, you know, what about
the tomatoes? How they grow? A lot of
the kids that hurt park Elementary talk tomatoes came in
a little card with four tomatoes wrapped in plastic.
Sounds like it's totally not how tomatoes. So we
, uh, we work with the, with the
science, one of the science classes there and germinated
seeds and show them, you know, that,
you know, you can get your hands dirty and
it's fun, you can learn. And that was
one of the ways that we actually got to buy
in. Uh, actually put this garden in,
we put in a Children's garden so they can go
out, do different experiments. And garden is only
like a block and a half away from the schools
that gets them, you know, moving around and
exercising. But it's also a way we thought if
we can get it, if we can get the
kids uh, on board to make better choices for
food, healthy choices that can infiltrate the home and
hopefully get their parents to do the same thing.
One of the things with these neighborhoods, we use
the term of food desert, but it's really a
food swamp. It's not that they don't have access
to food. There's plenty of food. You can
have every dollar menu you want if you go,
you know, one block in each direction of school
. But it's just about making healthy choices and access
to healthy choices. And that's why we decided to
work with kids with this particular garden with essence.
Our comments. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm wondering
what, I'm wondering what will happen. Morality plays
in the world. I see a lot of,
you know, space another side of it. Our
, so maybe I, I can give an example
for, for growing up. So with, with
the uh be working with habitat for humanity and building
houses and stuff in these communities to help uh with
some of the issues of vacancy. And so what
we've been doing is doing temporary gardens and so,
you know, you might have one or two growing
seasons where the garden is there. Um and then
like the third season of houses is put in that
particular place and the garden moves. So as as
a residence see the garden kind of progressing through the
neighborhood. They can see that as a moment of
change. They're so we're group have been smart and
working with habitat and some other uh local nonprofits about
where can we get in to get short leases on
land? Um So we have this whole notion of
healthy food, but also a viable housing options for
residents. So we uh we taken in consideration uh
, time and that too time. Uh Yeah,
I don't know that. I have like all that
much to say about time other than that. Um
I do a lot of different kinds of projects and
some are really compressed because they're on commission and some
are really long and drawn out um in in general
. Um sometimes I feel like I write the same
book over and over and over again, because I
feel like our artistic obsessions don't leave us, they
just reformulate themselves in various ways. Um And so
uh there's certain things I come back to over and
over the built environment of cities and ex urban places
and interstitial spaces or things that I come back to
over and over again over a certain period of time
. I've been working in a really um Interesting mode
lately, which is I take the same poem and
try to rewrite it from memory 10 or 11 times
, and it comes out different each time. Um
And so and so the way that Holmes stopped time
in a particular way, and that's something that I
noticed very palpably when I did this project on Detroit
and kind of vacancies in Detroit um is that you
can create a really um concrete narrative of dissolution in
Detroit. Um But what ended up happening when I
went and then this photographer went before and after I
went, is that some of the people's stories um
when he went back, actually, their lives got
better um and their stories got better. And so
I'm really cautious these days about creating very distinct temporal
narratives that say one thing that say we're all doomed
or um everything's gonna be okay, because I feel
like I can't, I don't know that. Um
but that's why I like to return to some of
the same subjects over and over again over a period
of time to see how they've changed or whether or
gotten better or just transformed, I think, and
the question of temporal itty that I think about the
most is my own knowledge of a place and having
just come here and time thinking like, okay,
the panel is about the local, I felt kind
of like, I don't, I haven't been here
long enough to be able to really comment on the
local here, but I could talk about my,
the way that I have grown up, experienced local
in other places and like this idea of moving and
relearning a place. Um So yeah, I think
like maybe for me it's about the time that it
takes to get to know a place and what,
what starts to emerge, the more you look and
the more you investigate, kind of, building on
the question of browsing time, have you ever have
any of you ever gone to a place where something
is originally, there were originally one way and then
come back and it has changed, it has changed
the attitude or exchanged the culture of that place,
people? Yeah, could you mind standing up?
Yeah. So, kind of, building on the
question of temporal at the end of time, have
you guys ever gone to a place? Uh that
is originally one way and as it progresses, and
it may change in some spatial attitude or some special
sense, does it ever change the attitude or the
culture of that place? Mhm. Can I take
a stab at that? So I was uh I
guess that she was my age, but I was
born in New York in 1975, which was a
time when like, there was a famous New York
Post Headline, Ford to city drop dead, like
it was a time where the entire federal government was
trying to divorce urban America. And so the new
york I grew up in was very um much like
urban dissolution and it impacted my aesthetics pretty deeply,
so that what I found beautiful was very skewed,
um you know, like graffitied subway cars and broken
windows and empty buildings and all of these other things
. Um New york is really different now and my
my uh my parents still live there. I grew
up in queens. It's really different now and it's
not the same place of my childhood or even the
same place of my Um 20s when I lived there
where you could be kind of like a working artist
there and in the gentrification, sanitization, um It
feels like the values of the city have changed too
and become more capitalist and different and so I don't
know if that's kind of an example, but it
means that um when I go back there, it's
not a place I usually make art from anymore um
or that I I feel like I can access in
the same ways that I did. It's better for
a lot of people, it's worse for a lot
of people, but I don't I'm not able to
kind of access the same points of reference as an
artist. Yeah, so I have kind of a
maybe like a different different frame. I start thinking
about lighting and how when I'm photographing, particularly sex
shop, so I'm usually like on a road trip
and I see one coming up, I'm gonna stop
but then I really only have the lighting that's there
to work with. And as I, as I
build up the series, I can tell that it's
like some that I wish. I feel like the
lighting doesn't convey the mood that I want. But
it could be like eight hours away and not something
I can even like time to get there at sunset
or anything. So even within a day I think
that time affects the lighting of an image. Oh
there are two more questions will take this to the
yeah a design decision. Exactly. So black.
We'd love me and that is to gentrification our position
part always managed here sort of have an innocent isolate
nation but rainforest system efficient. Um, so I
just wonder when you are doing your password arguing with
the witness is how much do you think intention of
? Too much cautious about? Yeah. Yeah.
I guess usually I guess for the work that I
like to do with communities, I try to understand
, it's not the impact that I see that the
effect try to highlight the impacts from the community,
from their voices themselves. So using the stories helps
that. So it's not just me saying I see
this as an issue and that's the problem. But
I try to unpack some of those the ways of
try to guess unpacked the impact right? Of some
of the decisions that a lot of times are levied
on because they feel like they're in position, I
don't have power or something like that. Oh and
that's usually how I do that. And then a
lot of times that helps to be the first step
of empowerment, realizing that there's other people affected by
the same thing. And a lot of times you
can get to communities kind of so try to keep
me out of, try to bracket myself, so
it's not what clc but it's be providing away for
forced to be relevant. Yeah. So one so
yeah, I've been thinking about this license to 35
this morning just it involves presented sort of wondering slam
the difference point of view. Role, population,
social justice, questions threats through ways. That's it
. But these days, okay. Part where is
the gap? Oh urbanite, liberal arts like sort
of use our hands on or anything you're standing?
Yeah. Uh huh. Button and vice versa to
arrange, hey you're here. Mhm. And that's
something if I can go back to walmart for a
minute, will you allow me? I think so
, one of the things that's interesting is when I
started writing about walmart and like I actually write a
lot about walmart and I actually write in walmart like
I'll go to the lawn and garden center sometimes in
the spring and just sit and right there because they
have like lawn furniture out. But when I first
started telling people, I was writing about walmart,
a lot of people sent me this website called People
of walmart, which is like an incredibly ungenerous and
really like offensive way of saying I'm not these people
. Um and I feel like any kind of,
you know, I can't speak for a design,
but I feel like any kind of art if you're
and this has to do with like, again,
being of a place or not of a place.
Like I think for me as like a liberal new
york jew coming here was like the weirdest thing and
it took me a really long time, you know
, like displacement as part of my family history.
Um my grandparents survived Auschwitz and my mom was a
refugee and displaced persons camp for eight years before she
got a visa to go anywhere. And so I
felt very displaced here in many ways. But I
also know that like um that if I were to
enter into any kind of artistic project about place,
there's no way I couldn't implicate myself. There's no
way I could say, let me show you this
, but I couldn't be a part of it in
some way. And so I think acknowledging for those
of us who are not from here but are here
that were these like weird condo. It's or eliminate
people that can bridge that gap in some way.
Um so for my urban friends, when I write
about experiences, I have with like the weird shooting
range that's unofficial, that's kind of like sort of
in my backyard but not really. Um that sheriff's
deputies used or that you know like my neighbors four
wheel and that's not a thing where I'm from or
any of these other like kind of weird cultural things
that to me I feel like I can't um I
need to understand them. Um when I go to
gun shows I try to figure out like like why
is it that people would get a taser that you
could hit someone over the head with if you need
to like what kind of world do you inhabit that
you feel at risk in that way. And so
I feel like that that's a piece of it to
me that's part of a solution maybe maybe. Thank
you. Yeah I guess um I think I think
understanding that are telling myself that I don't understand this
world or what I like it's much more complex than
I than the assumptions I bring to it are.
And Mhm. And then the other thing I I
don't I don't talk to as many people when I'm
working, but I do think in the back of
my mind, if someone asked me what I'm doing
, I think I usually tell students that if they
want to get out of something, tell them it's
an art project because they won't ask him any more
questions. So I tried to come up with an
explanation that isn't it's an art project. And like
how can I, how can I convey what I'm
, You know what I'm curious about? And then
in a way that opens up a conversation rather than
just being like, so, so artist, it
could capitalism, uh, you know, uh I
guess for me, yeah, it's the same thing
about being in Appalachia, right? Just like,
I'm not from here, but I've been so later
with Virginia tech for a long time. I'm not
gonna tell you how long, uh, but you
know, being in a place and I always say
it's the greatest place in the country to see the
landscape architecture because we're smack dab in Appalachia mountains.
But it's interesting that so I have this, it
is one of those ongoing projects where about landscape literacy
and sense of community index. And I've been working
on this with a small community called Newport and understanding
like where their ties to the landscape. You know
, a lot of families have been there for a
long time, then also asked some similar questions too
. Uh, some family families in ruins because that's
, to me that's urban, Appalachian roanoke to me
is where mountains and city meat. It's kind of
a unique place. And so I'm trying to unpack
those same questions. It's like, okay, you
have this, you know, I guess one of
the major things that you can kind of see that
urban and rural populations are often times facing similar social
environmental pressures, but they might not be aware of
it aware of that themselves. And so at some
point I would like to bring like two communities together
. And I actually like big intense power about like
one of the things that are happening. Um,
just to kind of see what life in the Appalachians
really about, especially not from. I'm curious have
a greater curiosity about this place and the people so
great. I think we should probably stop there.
That's your conversation can keep going. I want to
thank our plans for coming so much for sharing your
time and thoughts and you're afraid of teaching work.
It's been really, really wonderful. And I think
what's really for me, it's all amazing to hear
, but especially the idea of putting together her disciplinary
conversation is that these this conversation, and it shows
how you blur the boundaries between someone who represents the
space by writing about it, by photographing it and
someone who maybe acts on a space by intervening as
a professional. That you can see, that those
boundaries are not clear at all, that they're very
much blurred, that it is all acts of telling
, seeing and telling stories. So, thank you
very much for coming.