Ask Me About Gentrification

Posted by DIM on November 1, 2006

  • Date: October 13-15, 2006
  • Location: Trash room in Coral Street Arts House, Philadelphia
  • Managing Directors:
    Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Meaning (DIM)
    Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Neutrality (DIN)
    Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of the Unmentionable (DIUM)

ask me about gentrificationask me about gentrificationask me about gentrification

The buttons were part of a kind of rouge project nestled in a larger show at the Coral Street Arts House. The arts house is a building that was rehabbed by the local CDC. It is subsidized low income housing for artists. NKCDC’s platform is to create an “arts corridor” out of frankford ave. The think tank looks at coral street as a mechanism of institutionalized gentrification. The neighborhood, Kensington (affectionately known as the “badlands”), has been on the downslide for a long time.

So coral street was having a show for the residents of the building during the Fringe [Festival]. This was when they were bringing through the bus tours. A TT Director was living there at the time - in fact she had volunteered to help organize the show. At the same time NKCDC was organizing this “directory” of local artists (statement, work sample, name, address, etc) —its stated intention was to publicize and promote the work of artists living in Fishtown/Kensington. The same TT Director had also submitted herself to this project—of which she was promptly refused. There was no stated criteria for inclusion, though she quickly discovered you had to be selling your work (she is a performance and conceptual artist). It then surfaced that the residence show was also somewhat unwilling to include her in the show as well, for fear of driving away “buyers” with her performance work.

So the TT Directors took over a small room—which is labeled as the “trash room”—and created a show with in the show of works that were not for sale. The buttons were part of that, and were presented to the art-goers for free to take and wear for the duration of the tour. Once pinned, we invited art-goers to Erica’s Bar across the street (with both a poster and a video invitation). Erica’s is a Puerta Rican bar that has had some clashes with the artist residents (mostly over loud music). The TT has befriended the owners who would like the business of the new residents although few residents ever go there. So we wanted art-goers to label themselves, then actually participate in gentrification by inhabiting this local bar. We hoped for the project to be a bit unsettling, but people really seemed to embrace the chance to implicate themselves. […]
—Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Neutrality and Palatability (DINP)

[…]

A few places where I take issue with your [DINP’s] text in describing the events surrounding the CSAH is one is that you refer to me as a TT member. I think it is important to name who we are as Directors first, rather than simply the generic TT member. The reason for this is as we have made clear through conversations that insisting that we are directors first, who are responsible and accountable to our departments actions, we address by negation the slippery slope that members of a collective are susceptible too-That being the lack of individual accountability. (I would like to point out that individual accountability is different than subjectivity and perhaps this is why we take on the name of Directors rather than using our personal names. Directorship suggest agency while differentiating it from stereotypes of artistic subjectivity.) In saying this I would think it is also important to speak of our events in the same way. For example DIUM (not we the TT) decided to take over the trash room and invite TT members with other artists from the community, whose work does not have commercial value to participate in an installation of the trash room. The video invitation to Erica’s Bar was instituted by DIUM. DIN and DIM produced the “gentrifier” buttons and so on.

As far as your description of NKCDC goes: its motivations for attracting artist- as carrots for more lucrative clientele, you are right on about that..institutional gentrification at its worst perhaps. […]
—Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of the Unmentionable / Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Authenticity (DIUM/DIA)

KEYWORDS: gentrification, identity, place, projects