Real Estate
Real Estate: Creating Land Value & Dispossession
As California property values continue to skyrocket, and tensions rise over how to cope with the resulting displacement and dispossession of different communities, Headlands offers an alternative and creative approach to the crisis. Join us for a round table discussion moderated by Christian L. Frock with Amy Balkin, Adriana Camarena, and Kirk Crippens—three artists addressing issues of property rights, stories of immigration and forced relocation, and the profound effects of the recent recession. During an optional outdoor stroll prior to the talk, urban geographer Richard A. Walker shares the history of development and parklands in the Bay Area, including the story of Marincello—the residential project that almost overtook the Marin Headlands.
Please RSVP for the outdoor stroll here.
Guest Artists
Amy Balkin: Artist and researcher Amy Balkin’s project This is the Public Domain pivots on the 2003 purchase of a parcel of land in Kern County, California, 100 miles north of Los Angeles. This site and its resources have been proposed by Balkin for use as an international commons in perpetuity. The landlocked 2.64 acres will be used as public domain with continued research and implementation of the legal strategies necessary for releasing private ownership to the global public.
Adriana Camarena: Unsettlers: Migrants, Homies, and Mammas in the Mission District of San Francisco, a layered literary book project by Adriana Camarena, brings voice and visibility to experiences of the working class immigrants in San Francisco’s infamous Mission District. Culling personal accounts, photographs and drawings, video footage, and idiosyncratic maps, The Unsettlers Project—which received a 2013 CalHum Community Stories grant—resists straightforward methods of storytelling, and instead poignantly casts a dappled light on the complexities of geographic, social, and identity borders.
Kirk Crippens: Photographer Kirk Crippens’ series The Great Recession: Foreclosure, USA visually documents real estate properties in Stockton, California—a city where “in the first quarter of 2009, one in every twenty-seven housing units in the area received a foreclosure notice, against a national rate of about one in one hundred and fifty-nine.” Employing striking formalism, Crippens’ photographs present poignantly disheveled mise-en-scénes of both domestic and commercial life that, while physically arrested in development, are ripe with the semantics of lingering agitation.
Image: Amy Balkin, This is the Public Domain.