The Portland State University Art and Social Practice group recently had a vacant lot in Northeast Portland, OR, near Alberta street. We were building a structure there that we hoped would be a hub for various art activities and community-based art projects as well as a movable classroom. Recently, we walked around the neighborhood, stopping in various offices and businesses and just asking them what they do. One particularly telling stop we made was at a house that facilitated a group called Sisters in Action. Here’s a picture of an informative sign that they’ve made:

A member there told us about how Sisters in Action raise women leaders in the community through social and political action. We discussed briefly the state of middle schools and how many have been shut down but they are still needed. They want to make sure the schools aren’t just sold to private investors so more condos can be put in. The issue of gentrification came up when we asked about one of their window signs that exhorted participants of Last Thursday – a monthly event that fills the streets of Alberta. The sign read “Last Thursday, What Is It You Are Celbrating?” and another sign read “Last Thursday is an Example of Gentrification.” From what I’ve heard, Last Thursday started as mostly a bunch of artist-type people having fun and doing little street performances and has now turned into a night that not only fuels local businesses but also causes police action because of the large amount of people drunk in public. The problem is that many new businesses have moved into the neighborhood solely because it is now a reasonably profitable neighborhood. This in turn is driving out lower income residents who have lived there all their life. We all know the story, this happens all over the place. What the Sisters in Action group told us is that many of the new business don’t have in mind the interests of the community but rather their own monetary intersts.

This predicament was interesting for us, being that we were a bunch of art students and thereby contributing to gentrification by erecting our own little program. But we are also “art and social practice” students and we concern ourselves with the social elements located in a given site. How could we balance this? The situation became more tense for us when the New York Times released an article about how Portland applauds itself for being so environmental and progressive, yet the people here turn their heads when it comes to the displacement of one of it’s own communities. Ouch!

Not knowing what to do about this situation I decided that I would host an active boycott of Last Thursday. A group of the students got together in a different neighborhood on the night of Last Thursday and we watched the utopian/dystopian movie The Lathe of Heaven (1980), which was originally written by the novelist, and Portlander Ursula Le Guin. This movie is one of my science fiction favorites. In it, whenever George Orr dreams, that dream becomes a reality. A scientist discovers this and begins attempting to control the dreams so that he can make a name for himself and solve the world’s problems. Whenever he tries to solve the world’s problems, however, things go terribly wrong. One of my favorite lines in this movie is at the end when George tells the doctor that maybe every person’s dreams becomes reality and he just doesn’t know. Oh the intensity of that statement! There is no one utopia, each person’s world is his/her own and sometimes our world’s overlap, but generally, people’s ideals are going to shift from one person to the next

After watching this movie with the group I felt more empowered to do these community-based art projects out in the neighborhood. We had been given the opportunity to work in that neighborhood, to get off of the boring PSU campus, and to really try out some public art. I was an outsider to the neighborhood and should not attempt to solve “problems,” but rather to move forward with the community’s interest in mind.

Sandy Sampson and I decided to collaborate on a project. We began what we called the “Neighborhood Resource Exchange” where people could identify their needs as well as tools/resources they could offer other community members. When we had enough information we were able to put people in contact with each other. For example, if a couple people grew to much food in their garden, and another person knew how to can food, we connected them. We launched this project with a neighborhood Meet & Greet BBQ where neighbors showed up, ate some good food, and met each other if they did not already know each other. Here are a couple images from that event:
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Our next event was scheduled to be a Swap Meet as a continuation of the Neighborhood Resource Exchange. Due to some unforseen circumstances, however, we needed to cancel all events on the lot and we would no longer use the space. It seemed almost fateful that this happened, many of us felt relieved, given our concerns about us contributing to gentrification.

I would like to end with a quote from an art theorist, Miwon Kwon, in her book One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity:
“Homi Bhabha has said, ‘the globe shrinks for thos who own it; for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers.’ Today’s site-oriented practices inherit the task of demarcating the relational specificity that can hold in tension the distant poles of spatial experienced described by Bhabha. This means addressing the differences of adjancies and distances between one thing, one person, one place, one thought, one fragment next to another, rather than invoking equivalencies via one thing after another.