Ryan Griffis : www.yougenics.net/griffis
Review of “Entorno: Grass Grows Greener On the Other Side”
April 28 - May 20, 2006 at Polvo, 1458 W. 18th St 1R Chicago, IL 60608
The City of Chicago is currently undergoing efforts to become the “greenest
city in America.” Thanks to the current Mayor Daley’s “Green
Building Agenda,” new building projects that receive tax breaks from
the city will be required to have a “green roof” - one example
of the matrix of policies that will push the hue of the city closer to the
green end of the spectrum. Such changes to the architecture of the city will
provide partial, yet massively scaled, solutions to urban water drainage problems
and energy consumption. Given the current national direction of environmental
deregulation, such policies should, of course, be applauded. But, they also
need to be considered within the ongoing historical context of the city as
well. The impact of this greening on the other color lines in Chicago for example,
is one place to start.
“Entorno: Grass Grows Greener on the Other Side,” an exhibition
organized by the Polvo Art Collective, takes on such spatial and historical
politics of color, where so-called green urbanism meets racial redlining. With
it’s name as an introduction, “Entorno” -- which means environment
in Spanish -- situates itself as critically engaged with the ambivalent relationship
between American green values, whether it’s of the suburban lawn variety
or more current ecological sensibilities, and its subjugated populations. Organized
by Polvo founders, Elvia Rodriguez-Ochoa, Miguel Cortez and Jesus Macarena-Avila,
the exhibition brings together an array of artifacts by 14 artists and collectives
-- from performance to mixed-media installation to documentary -- that attempt
to locate us within an invested perspective rather than a universalizing totality.
One major sub-theme within the exhibition is a critique of the formal language
used to understand and critique space, aimed at both the bureaucratic language
of the planner and our everyday, vernacular experience. Miguel Cortez’s “2006
City of Chicago Displacement Map” (2006), for example, overlays personal
utterances upon a rational map of the city that facilitates equally the city
of Chicago’s evolving housing program and its critique. While the city
uses cartography to disperse historically concentrated public housing residents
into actual neighborhoods, critics of the program use the same techniques to
reveal that this dispersion is actually maintaining the same kind of racial
segregation that it’s supposed to be challenging. Or as one mapped individual
states, “You feel like everyone is staring at you, saying, mmm-hmmm,
she’s a section 8.” Area Chicago, a recently inaugurated political-cultural
publication, contributed a series of city maps created by readers and other
local participants. Drawn, printed and collaged upon a minimal template provided
by Area, the maps included multi-layered and serious investigations of land
use in the city as well as the idiosyncratic interpretations of local high
schoolers.
Of course, at a time when masses of people have been gathering across the country
to embody a response to border politics, the presence of actual bodies cannot
be ignored. Chicago-based performance and spoken-word artist Anida Yoeu Esguerra’s
performance, “What’s Green?,” (2006) juxtaposed the artist’s
animated body with the loaded imagery of disposable plastic “Thank You” bags
and street level views of the city. In Jesus Macarena-Avila’s “Extinction
of a Ghetto Artist” (2006), we’re presented with an uncomfortable
memorial mound topped with a small cassette player. Hanging several feet above,
is the ubiquitous pair of sneakers, suspended from a telephone wire, pointing
to the conspicuous, and maybe ideological, absence of a contingent body with
uneasy humor.
The Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has written about the “politics of
verticality” - the vertical delineation of boundaries governing things
like access to airspace, transportation and water. Weizman’s analysis
of Israeli spatial militarism seems to have something to offer in this consideration
of racialized spatial politics in Chicago. Is the rooftop greenspace being
promoted by the Mayor yet another way that the city can continue to ignore
the environmental health of its neglected citizens? And is the height of telephone
poles an appropriate distance from which to police the city with surveillance
cameras - a policy highlighted by an exhibited work by the Mess Hall Collective. “Entorno” also
includes civic projects like the Citizen and Voter Training School, PilsenAyuda
and Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization. Perhaps what we’re
seeing now, with the growth of environmental justice movements, is an integration
of horizontal and vertical perspectives, able to see where neighborhood lines
are drawn but also where vertically stacked layers are shared.