smoke signals: istwa, paisajes and allegories

Onyedika Chuke Yanira Collado Lourdes Correa Carlo Rashawn Griffin Glexis Novoa Jerome Reyes Carlos Sandoval de Leon Onajide Shabaka Noelle Theard Robert Thiele Anna Tsouhlarakis Mary Valverde

curated by William Cordova

ON VIEW December 15, 2012 - February 17, 2013

From left to rigth: Onyedika Chuke, Untitled | Jerome Reyes, Rappling for a blind jump into the heart of Chiba City | Onyedika Chuke, Untitled | Robert Thiele, Untitled 6-9 | Yanira Collado, como envuelta en la neblina de una lluvia | Glexis Novoa, Untitled (Archeology) | Carlos Sandoval de Leon, Untitled | smoke signals: istwa, paisajes and allegories

Curated by ArtCenter alumnus William Cordova, will challenge what may be familiar perceptions of our surroundings through unconven- tional materials. Many of the materials these artists incorporate into their work are often sourced from traditional building materials, found objects and textiles. The exhibition proposes alternative methods of reconsidering our own presence and values.

smoke signals: istwa, paisajes and allegories curated by William Cordova

The Richard Shack Gallery 800 Lincoln Road, Beach, FL 33139 www.artcentersf.org

Installation photographed by Onajide Shabaka & William Cordova Designed by Elsa Paricio

From left to rigth: Glexis Novoa, Untitled (Archeology) | Rashawn Griffin,o Bring Love/Terrible Things | Robert Thiele, Untitled 6-8 | Onajide Shabaka, Untitled (multi-panel) | GHOST MONUMENT by Gean Moreno

The antidote is the flexibility afforded by controlled remembering, not only of what we were but, in the same emancipatory act, of what we might be. -Sanford Kwinter-

It’s difficult or, perhaps, too fright- block, the lot is well-sodded and caged eningly easy to convey: there is nothing by a generic chain-link fence. But to pro- there. Pointing at it, one points at empti- pose that it is caged already sounds a note ness at a vacant and flat corner lot. At a that is too aggressive; it starts to texture blank. An absence. One can either accept the space we are talking about, against the that there is nothing there as the empirical evidence on the ground, which points to evidence suggests or, knowing what has an absolute flatness of affect. The fence’s happened, be overtaken by the sensation role is to propose that it pens in nothing that an element had been expertly extract- of much significance another nondescript ed from the scene. It’s as if something has chunk of unbuilt and treeless terrain; a been sanded off the high relief of real- stretch of underutilized land available for ity, shaved down to a bedrock of indis- future development. This is how it seems, tinguishable material, flattened back into how it’s been made to seem: the lot can be the general grammar of urban sameness. little else than the setting for an average There is nothing for imagination or mem- uneventfulness, a flatlined blankness; the ory to find traction on. There is nothing to counterpart to the large stretches in which see. And, naturally, there is no one look- nothing happens that often fill our days. ing. Who’d find it sensible to make a pil- And maybe also a counterpart to the way grimage to a blank, to a textureless patch in which we often come up with nothing in the urban fabric? when we try to imagine different ways to live. The lot barely registers as you drive The lot sits at the intersection of past it or as you sit waiting for the light to Northwest 62 Street and 17th Avenue, in change. Placards announcing contenders , a neighborhood embalmed in in the local city council race are clamped the Miami’s official history and imaginary to the fence. as the site of the devastating race riots of the 1980s and, more generally, as an area And yet, under this imposed carapace plagued with high crime rates, high unem- of blankness, behind the fence that stands ployment numbers, and other indices that for more perverse enclosures, the lot palpi- we accept with our critical faculties on tates with a disquieting and disruptive se- automatic pilot. The size of a small city cret. This is, after all, the site where the The

From left to rigth: Noelle Theard, Dogon Dwellings | Carlos Sandoval de Leon, Untitled | Noelle Theard, On the boat ride up the Niger to Timb | Yanira Collado, yoyo brujo; ogando un grito | GHOST MONUMENT by Gean Moreno

Umoja Village was founded on October re-channeling public resources to capture solutions of an obsolete welfare state. eventually assumed control and responsi- 23, 2006(1). In the middle of a rampant and accommodate as much of the transna- They may have been necessary to amelio- bility over the running of the shantytown. building boom that was disproportionately tional capital that is floating around these rate certain historically specific problems To assert the legality of the occupation inflating land value and generating more days as possible. in the past, but these days they only im- of a city-owned lot, the activists used condo units in the city that could be filled, pinged in the “free” space in which the the settlement of the 1988 ACLU-driven at a pace that boggles reasonable thinking More specifically, the deterioration in market should be allowed to do its thing Pottinger vs. City of Miami case, which and calculation, signaling a coming crisis low income and public housing is the re- and the market, of course, is the solution allows homeless individuals to undertake of overproduction, and accompanied by a sult of allowing the market to exclusively to everything, the guarantor of our col- “life-sustaining” activities, such as sleep- housing policy markedly slanted to benefit determine the allotment of basic social lective betterment. It distributes benefits ing, eating, and erecting provisional struc- developers and other speculators, the qual- amenities. It’s the result of the absolute across the board, we are told. The winners tures, in public land when shelter space ity and quantity of low-income housing in commodification of shelter and urban drag the losers up with them. The track is unavailable. The settlement protects Miami hit a dismal low. Apartments were land of commodification as a structur- record is clear on this, no? the homeless from police harassment and being sealed-off and demolished, rather ing principle in the organization of ur- arrest. Since the city has 1350 emergency than rehabilitated and occupied by new ten- ban space. The Housing Market renders The Housing Market rigs things in beds, according to The New York Times, ants, as soon as families moved out. Federal use secondary to profit, thereby fostering order to maximize profit in the shortest for a population of 5000 homeless indi- dollars were sought to enact dubious pro- the possibility of neglect in the face of amount of time possible at the expense of viduals, the perennial unavailability of grams that literally diminished the stock speculation. It renders acceptable the dec- everything else. A hierarchical valuation of shelter space is understood to be an in- available rental units. And it wasn’t simply imation of communities and all kinds of times is at the center of all this. There is controvertible fact. that there was a shortage of housing, but social networks through the break-up of the time or timetables of those who count that what was available was often in dire the spatial-urban arrangements in which developers, speculators, the real estate sec- The shantytown was accidentally de- conditions, infested by rodents, neglected they emerge and are nested. Renewal be- tor, politicians, businessmen and the time- stroyed by fire six months after it was es- by both county officials and landlords, fall- comes code for and patterns tables that are to be disregarded those of tablished. Subsequent negotiations with ing to pieces, edging abjection when not of dispossession and displacement. Any multi-generational community building, the city started, if we take on good faith neck-deep in it. This was compounded by possibility to establish and be account- for instance. This asymmetry is built into the promises of politicians, on the right the rapid increase in rents on private units able to standards for decent living condi- the system and it hides destructive conse- foot with the possibility of a deal to di- even in neighborhoods with large popula- tions, particularly in relation to minority quences that register neither in the bottom- rectly convey the land to a 501(c)3 estab- tions of poor people, edging out long-time communities, are curtailed. And this cur- lines of developers nor in the campaign lished by the activists and the residents. residents. As this was the bleak reality faced tailing is divested of significance, i.e., its contribution accounts of politicians. This was to happen outside of the usual by hundreds of families, it was also, more status as violating a public obligation is (and usually corrupt) bidding process. On abstractly although no less tellingly, an in- obfuscated, through the naturalization It is against this background that the the land, a mixed-use building would be dex of progressive social disintegration in of the market system and a mobilization activist coalition , erected with the aid of low income hous- the face of increasingly obsequious “flex- of certain affects, like shame in displaced spearheaded by Max Rameau, appropri- ing advocate-developers. In the end, this ible responses” to the ultimately unsatisfi- individuals and stigmatizing aversion and ated the vacant lot, once itself the site of led nowhere. Lobbyist interceded in the able demands and predatory routines of scorn toward them in populations who go a 62 unit low-income housing building, process, blocked direct conveyance of investment and capital. The deterioration about their daily lives at a distance from and cobbled together an encampment the land, and have stalled further move- in low-income and public housing is one the communities suffering displacement. out of a combination of tents and ship- ment on the issue ever since. This is how of the wretched consequences of the bal- Anything that challenges the dynamics ping pallet shanties. It was named The we have come to have an empty lot. In ance that has been struck, on the shoulders of the regime of capital public housing Umoja Village. (Umoja is Swahili for uni- retrospect, the demise of the shantytown of economic “common sense”, between and other forms of social security, for in- ty.) It became home to a group of home- can be read as a catalyst for a re- con- withdrawing basic social provisions and stance is, at best, considered the artificial less and under-housed individuals, who solidation of power by representatives of GHOST MONUMENT by Gean Moreno the status quo. In the ‘afterlife’ of Umoja efficiency of the state and the economic material plane, can’t fully eradicate the re- its core, a desire to seize an opportunity for something beyond the initial problems structuring it supports by highlighting its sidual symbolic traces of the shantytown, self-determination, and the articulation of that led to the emergence the shantytown very real material inefficiency. Above all, the vestiges of its lesson on the possibility an economy of care. There was the radi- becomes clear: that cooperative and mu- Umoja was a bottom-up solution very of reshaping urban space. cally pragmatic gesture of building shel- tual ownership and management of pub- clearly predicated on turning away from ter where there was room for it, on public lic land, as well as the determination of the public institutions that had failed in This being said, we should avoid any land, without bending to imposed regula- the needs and solutions of a commu- their obligations to the population the effort to mythify Umoja as a physically tion and entrenched habit, disregarding nity from within that community, find shantytown now housed, without, in idyllic site. It was rudimentary from tech- permitting systems and other conventions, themselves in fundamental contradiction turn, looking to the market for solutions. nological and infrastructural points of and of building it collectively and in such with the current spatial organization and It divested the state of authority over the view. In fact, it was this quality that may a way, as a village-formation, that opened distribution of benefits of the contem- management of rights. It unveiled the po- have led to its demise: the village burned it to the possibility of collective admin- porary city. Interventions and compro- litical apparatus as replaceable and drew when one of the candles used for lighting istration. The last thing we want to do is mises with the political structure need at attention to its routines and its failures, tipped over. But how could it be otherwise disregard the productive response at the the very least to be buttressed by a con- and to the relation between them of mu- than primitive on this level? Umoja was, heart of a situation that emerged out fun- certed effort to inculcate at every level a tual constitution. It also reiterated what whatever other qualities developed there, damental lack. There was empirical activity different conception of what shelter is we already know: that the system suffers an emergency operation, a provisional that demands to be valued on its own mer- and how the city ought to be organized. from a structural incapacity to retain any in the middle of the unfolding its. After all, Umoja endured against a for- Otherwise these interventions and com- conception of shelter and land as any- social disaster of another building boom midable pressure to fold. And more than promises are just moments of pause and thing but commodities. and wave of gentrification. Nor should this: it thrived. When Umoja burned, it was de-intensification during which power one allow celebration of Umoja, of the slated for waste collection three times a regains its footing and counters any mo- A wholesale refusal of the things as things it began to reveal as outmoded and week provided by the county. The convic- mentum against its interests. And this is they were, a renegotiation of the terms the spaces it cracked open, to diminish tion of some of the politicians who rose precisely what happened in this case. through which public land is employed, the magnitude of the structural failures against the encampment caved in the end, and a challenge to the unilateral organi- and ubiquitous shortcomings of a social and their rhetoric shifted. The settlement Resistance to Umoja began almost as zation of the city to serve the economic system and the insecurity they spread so managed in a few short months to rattle soon as the first shanties went up. Using interests of the possessing class, Umoja widely that rendered the founding of a the political establishment and to plug to the Pottinger settlement mentioned cracked open on a symbolic plane a new shantytown a necessary gesture in the first public infrastructure, slightly torquing for a above, a police raid was deterred. But space beyond the run-down structures place and that continue to exist. One thing moment the way things are done and shift- in its place a political struggle ensued. that shelter the political imagination of the is to attempt a kind of reclamation project ing the horizon of possibility. Under the “humane” concern that the status quo, pluralizing the field of options. or salvage operation from the shores of village was a “health and safety hazard” It rendered contingent all that we usually popular imagination and memory, and an- to its residents, city officials indefatigably take as axiomatic and necessary. Umoja other is to magnify a single occurrence un- sought ways to close it. It was a nuisance wasn’t an alternative, not a long-term and til it blinds critical scrutiny and obfuscates to neighbors, an eyesore, they also said. sustainable one, but it was a wedge be- the enormity and effects of long-term and The real problem, however, was that the tween the present and the logic of a sys- on-going problems. shantytown was less a hazard to its resi- tem that canalizes most of the relations 1.For an invaluable on-the-ground account of The dents and their neighbors than to the in it in very particular ways, pressured by By the same token, there is no need to Umoja Village and the complex panorama of failed housing policy, gentrification, strategic coalition build- symbolic order and the material processes profit production and privatization. It is divest Umoja of its radical potential and ing, land movements, and the struggle for self-determi- that guide the habitation of the contem- for this reason that mere erasure, regard- turn it into a sad episode of grasping at last nation that led to its emergence, see Rameau, Max, Take Back the Land: Land, Gentrification, and The Umoja porary city. It compromised the symbolic less of how forcefully it is executed on a straws. There was a scorching defiance at Village Shantytown, Niapress, Miami, 2010. smoke signals: istwa, paisajes and allegories

From left to rigth: Onajide Shabaka, Untitled (multi-panel) | Onyedika Chuke, Untitled | Robert Thiele, Untitled 6-8 | Mary Valverde, Catcher | Robert Thiele, Untitled 6-9 | Onyedika Chuke, Untitled | Noelle Theard, Dogon Dwellings; On the boat ride up the Niger to Timb | Yanira Collado, yoyo brujo; ogando un grito; que ni lo vivo; distancia de voz; Para Claudinette te veo asi realmente asi como sos | Jerome Reyes Rappling for a blind jump into the heart of Chiba City, 2012 Custom industrial strength nylon cable tie, hose hook 255 x .5” (fully extended cable) Glexis Novoa Untitled (Archeology), 2001 Site-specific graphite wall drawing, free pay phone (locals and interna- tional calls) and panic door; originally exhibited at New Works Miami, Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida 110’ long (partial drawing preserved, 69 x 103”) Yanira Collado como envuelta en la neblina de una lluvia, 2011 Bricks and interlining fabric 21.5 x 2.25 x 7.5” Robert Thiele Robert Thiele Untitled 6-8, 1997 Untitled 6-9, 1997 Cast concrete and glass Cast concrete, glass, laminated canvas and mixed media 10.5 x 7.5 x 3” 30.5 x 6.5”

Courtesy of Dorsch Gallery Courtesy of Dorsch Gallery Onyedika Chuke Onyedika Chuke Untitled, 2010 Untitled, 2010 Wood, porcelain, and cast iron castors Firewood and castors 24 x 35 x 11 inches 6.5 x 24 x 7” Mary Valverde Catcher, 2012. (variation, original score 2007) String and nails 7 feet, diameter Robert Thiele Untitled #4, 1998 Acrylic on newspaper 29 x 22.75”

Untitled #5, 1998 Acrylic on newspaper 15 x 12”

Courtesy of Dorsch Gallery Carlos Sandoval de Leon Untitled, 1998 present Studio Broom 51 x 7 x 2” Onajide Shabaka Untitled (multi-panel), 2011 Wood, ceramic, metal, paint, resin, cast foam, children’s blackboard 73 x 105 x 3” Noelle Theard Noelle Theard Dogon Dwellings, 2011 On the boat ride up the Niger to Timbuktu, 2011 Digital C-print from negative 30 x 30” Digital C-print from a black and white negative 30 x 30” Edition of 5 Edition of 5 Rashawn Griffin To Bring Love/Terrible Things, 2004 Running time: 2:48 minutes Color DVD Lourdes Correa Carlo Model for the Retaining Wall, 2009 Inkjet print, digital collage 9 x 45” Yanira Collado yoyo brujo, 2012 | ogando un grito, 2012 | que ni lo vivo, 2012 | distancia de voz, 2012 | Para Claudinette te veo asi realmente asi como sos, 2012 | fabric, paper 5 x 7.5” Anna Tsouhlarakis Crossing, 2009 2-channel digital video Running time: 3:00 minutes Edition of 3