Smoke-Signals- -South-Florida-Art
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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, Miami 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 Liberty City, 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 gentrification 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 Take Back the Land, 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.