Just Space(s)
Just Space(s)
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)
September 26 – November 18, 2007
Organized by Ava Bromberg & Nicholas Brown
Everyday we confront spaces that don't work - from our neighborhoods and parks, to our prisons, pipelines and borders. In this exhibition and programming series, artists, scholars and activists reveal how these spaces function — and dysfunction — making way for thought and action to create just societies and spaces.
The projects in this exhibition reflect the renewed recognition that space matters to cutting edge activist practices and to artists and scholars whose work pursues similar goals of social justice. A spatial frame offers new insights into understanding not only how injustices are produced, but also how spatial consciousness can advance the pursuit of social justice, informing concrete claims and the practices that make these claims visible. Understanding that space - like justice - is never simply handed out or given, that both are socially produced, differentiated, experienced and contested on constantly shifting social, political, economic, and geographical terrains, means that justice — if it is to be concretely achieved, experienced, and reproduced — must be engaged on spatial as well as social terms.
By transforming LACE, in part, into an active learning environment, Just Space(s) seeks to provide visitors with tools to consider alternatives to reactionary and essentializing political discourse that tends to dominate and frame our conceptions of justice - and constrain our abilities to imagine and implement it. The exhibition presents some of the most innovative and efficacious contemporary artistic, activist, and scholarly work engaging social and spatial analyses. In addition, a library/infoshop and symposia and event series extend the scope and scale of the main exhibition. Taken in whole or in part, Just Space(s) aims not merely to show what is unjust about our world, but to inspire visitors to consider what the active production of just space(s) might look like. It asks a crucial question: How do we move from injustice to justice exactly where we stand - in our neighborhoods and our institutions, at the level of the body, the home, the street corner, the city, the region, the network, the supranational trade agreement and every space within, between, and beyond? While much theorizing about - and active experimentation with - the role and potential of a spatial justice framework remains undone, this exhibition and its public programming contribute to the articulation of a powerful concept/tool that links critical theory and ethical practice.
Just Space(s) builds upon the recent publication of a special volume of Critical Planning (UCLA Journal of Urban Planning, Volume 14, Summer 2007) on the theme of spatial justice, which also serves as a companion to the exhibition.
THEME#1 >>> (IM)MOBILITY / PRISONS AND THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
The Corrections Documentary Project (Ashley Hunt) /// Million Dollar Blocks (Spatial Information Design Lab) /// Up the Ridge (Appalshop's Holler to the Hood)
THEME#2 >>> (IM)MOBILITY / BORDERS, LABOR, MIGRATION
The Black Sea Files (Ursula Biemann) /// Political Equator (Teddy Cruz) /// disOrientation Guide (Counter-Cartographies Collective) /// Spatial Justice for Ayn Hawd (Sabine Horlitz and Oliver Clemens) /// Searching for Our Destination (Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri) /// Water Station Maps and Warning Posters (Humane Borders and No More Deaths) /// Host Not Found: A Traveling Monument of the Suppression of Search (Markus Miessen and Patricia Reed)
THEME#3 >>> ECONOMIC JUSTICE / THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
The Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice (SAJE - Strategic Actions for a Just Economy) /// Mobile Planning Lab for South LA (Scott Berzofsky, Chris Gladora, Dane Nester, Nicholas Wisniewski, and SAJE) /// UTOPIA-dystopia (Los Angeles Poverty Department) /// Principles of Unity (Right to the City Alliance) /// RFK in EKY (Appalshop and John Malpede) /// Spatializing Labor Campaigns (Service Employees International Union)
THEME#4 >>> ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE / PUBLIC HEALTH
Syracuse City Hunger Project Maps (Syracuse Community Geography) /// LATWIDNO - Land access to which is denied no one (Sarah Lewison and Erin McGonigle) /// Invisible5 (Amy Balkin, Tim Halbur, and Kim Stringfellow) /// Public Green (Lize Mogel) /// Public Access 101 - Malibu Public Beaches (Los Angeles Urban Rangers) /// Best Not to Be Here? (Marie Cieri)
THEME#5 >>> RACIALIZATION OF SPACE / SPATIALIZATION OF RACE
Detroit Do Your Thing! (the Center for Urban Pedagogy - CUP) /// Detroit's Underdevelopment (Adrian Blackwell) /// The New Yorkers' Guide to Military Recruitment in the 5 Boroughs (Friends of William Blake) /// A People's Guide to Los Angeles (Laura Pulido)
THEME#6 >>> LAND / INDIGENOUS EPISTEMOLOGIES, LAND CLAIMS & TREATY RIGHTS
A Century of Genocide in the Americas: The Residential School Experience (Rosemary Gibbons and Dax Thomas - Boarding School Healing Project) /// Dakota Commemorative March (Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and David Miller) /// Secret Military Landscapes and the Pentagon's "Black World" (Trevor Paglen) /// Spiral Lands (Andrea Geyer)
