Last year, angered by the position of the political right on immigration policy and the building of a fence along the U.S. border with Mexico, I began a series of works on paper that I titled collectively Cities and Walls. The works covered a wider range of subjects than just border issues, generally dealing with people on the move for various reasons and with government systems of control. I first did work on this matter in 1984 and 85 when I participated in groups sheltering and advocating for refugees from the civil war in El Salvador, but I left it to get involved in public art and public space projects and have only now returned to it.
In public art we talked so much of making place, trying to give places a sense of identity and resonance through design and often by drawing upon their histories for a sense of continuity. It seems to me now that a broader dynamic at work in the world is the loss of place. Working to give a jeopardized urban neighborhood a public space around which it can regroup and rebuild is an important act. It pales in realization of the enormity of the circumstances in which people have no place in which to even consider rebuilding. Here I refer to well-known situations where hundreds of thousands, even millions of people have been displaced by warfare which consumed their homes, but also to those situations in Bangladesh or some Pacific islands, for example, where environmental change is displacing people who find that their neighbors are unwilling to make room for them. Or, thinking in a completely different direction, displacement, loss of habitat, accounts for the largest share of species loss in the natural environment.
This spring Sylvia Watanabe and Bernard Matambo, two faculty members of the Creative Writing Program at Oberlin College, taught a class and, along with an interdisciplinary group of colleagues, organized a symposium both titled Geographies of Displacement. The idea that one could speak of geographies of displacement presented a flash of clarification for me. I always thought that my pieces had locations in a broad sense and, of course, one way to speak of locations in a broad sense is geography. To see that the displacements constituting the subject matter of my work can be linked through the association with geographies provides a thread that I can run from them through future works.
Thanks to the generous consent of Sylvia and Bernard, The Geographies of Displacement is the title of this exhibition, as well as the collective title for this body of work.
