by Elisheva Engel
Through violent processes of colonization and gentrification places often lose their historical nature, divorcing people from the past. Architectural movements like brutalism ushered in an ahistorical way of experiencing a space by washing away its character, stories, and legacy. How can site-specific film projection use its environment to rebel against these tendencies while restoring our historical connection to spaces we frequent? Expanding the reach of who sees certain types of films and has access to political consciousness can be an outcome of public projections. Asking important questions such as how can we reclaim public space as a means for political awareness and agency to encourage crucial conversations among people in our communities?
Within Our Gates (2008) was a site-specific installation by Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry whereby they projected archival footage of the Civil Rights movement onto an abandoned water tower in Sweet Auburn, Atlanta where Dr. Martin Luther King was raised. The cylindrical concrete water tower on Auburn Avenue was built in 1906 and was chosen as the location for this project for its architectural resonance and historical significance. The artists describe their work as “site-specific video work that draws upon 1960s news footage to create an immersive environment, and through that environment, brings to life the history of a place relevant as an architectural monument and as a vessel. Both are objects of containment and resonate as relics and receptacles of time.” Their work asks us to revisit a period in time, and to reattach ourselves to a point in history. This project intrigues me because it successfully revives a dead structure and lends it a new purpose and function. It seeks to reconnect us to a lost past.
Krzysztof Wodiczko is a Polish artist who primarily uses projection mapping in his work. In Charlestown, Boston, Wodiczko projected images onto the Bunker Hill monument which commemorated the fight for freedom during the American Revolution. The 19-minute looped projection aimed to restore a voice to the aggrieved and break the borough’s conspiracy of silence. It also featured testimonies, and confessions. From the artist’s site –
“Completed after seventeen years, the 221-foot structure stands on Breed’s Hill, the highest hill of Charlestown, Boston’s working-class district that has a particularly high murder and violence ratio, especially among young people. The artist transformed a historical monument devoted to freedom fighters into a monument of contemporary heroes trying to fight violence. On top of the huge obelisk were projected images of the faces of people recounting their experiences, mothers of murdered children, or young people who had lost their brothers or sisters. Shown from the waist up, they held candles or portraits of their dead loved ones, the huge images of their faces enlivening the monument, and their painful confessions and testimonies breaking the borough’s conspiracy of silence.”
In 2021 I projected images of the nearly 70 Palestinian children murdered by Israeli airstrikes that year onto a wall of the Israeli Embassy in Los Angeles. Security guards tried to have us move but as we were not causing any physical damages or technically touching the building they could not tell us to leave. We continued by projecting images of Shireen Abu Akleh, a prominent Palestinian journalist who was murdered by Israel that week, as well as text about the ethnic cleansing of Masafer Yatta. Using the oppressor’s own infrastructure to spread anti colonial/ anti zionist ideas is an example of the radical democratizing of space that projection mapping can achieve.
Another example of using projection for political messaging is a projection I did onto the Prada storefront on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. On Christmas eve the luxury retail strip floods with wealthy people spending exorbitant amounts of money on designer products which felt like the perfect time for my projection mapping idea. I projected the statistics of the Los Angeles housing crisis onto the storefront to create a stark juxtaposition of income inequality. The projection sparked critical conversation from bystanders and people walking by. The discomfort created was with the intention of breaking time-space realities. Beverly Hills is designed to keep unhoused people out, so the wealthy can enjoy their willful ignorance to the suffering of many Los Angeles natives. By projecting onto this luxury retailer, I am seeking to collapse the physical gap between the upper class’s comfort and blindness towards unhoused people and the experiences of the lower class in general.
Project Proposal
Using guerilla projecting tactics, I want to project the film Takeover, onto or next to the Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx to catalyze conversation in local communities on the power of direct action and organizing. Takeover is a documentary film that retells the events of the 12 hours that the Young Lords Party spent occupying the Lincoln Hospital in 1970 to demand better health care services and improve the overall quality of care residents were receiving. This film details the horrible conditions of the hospital and neglect by the city of the black and brown communities who relied on this resource. The media attention that the hospital takeover caused was astronomical with hundreds of reports showcasing the failure of the hospital, and mistreatment of its patients. The takeover resulted in significant reforms including the rebuilding of the Lincoln Hospital 6 years later.
