Project Row Houses: Shattering the Concrete: Artists, Activists and Instigators
Excerpt:
“Where this round really shines, though, is in the contrast between two installations: The Natural History Museum, presented in a collaboration between New York-based Not an Alternative and T.E.J.A.S., and the installation KARANKAWA CARANCAHUA CARANCAGUA KARANKAWAY by Nura Montiel and John Pluecker. Both ask for a deeper engagement and careful looking at a specific place–Houston–over time. And both pose significant questions about museum and community, politics and organizing, spaces between things and people, and how change happens. Most importantly, they consider how Houston’s own history is based on making certain peoples, histories, and things invisible.
“Take a deep breath” says a hologram tour guide in The Natural History Museum. The guide then narrates a tour through one of Houston’s “fence line” communities: residential areas situated directly beside factories that release large quantities of toxins into the air and water. Why do the world’s largest energy corporations build factories in Houston’s poorest communities, the guide asks, and how does the absence of zoning restrictions affect the lives of our city’s inhabitants. The tour points to the intersections between poverty, immigration, absence of zoning and public transportation, and ecological disaster. The installation also directly critiques the energy-sponsored educational programming and exhibitions of Houston’s Museum of Natural Science, making visible the problematic politics behind how science is taught to Houston school-children. It pointedly connects the ethics of museums in the age of corporate sponsorship with the conditions of life in our community. When these things are made invisible, they are made to seem natural; The Natural History Museum asks us to re-think the unnaturalness of it all.”
“Whereas The Natural History Museum emphatically makes statistics and air quality visible, Pluecker and Montiel use poetry to think about visibility, and consider how things fall apart. They are poignant approaches, especially when seen in relation to one other. Poetry is also politics. Research is also visual material. Like Project Row Houses itself, Montiel and Pluecker’s installation allows for the space in which to think through our own contingencies, even as they are filled with complexities and holes and spaces between things. What The Natural History Museumdoes is stick its fingers into some of those holes and spaces, and ask why and how they exist.”
Read in full here: http://artsandculturetx.com/project-row-houses-shattering-the-concrete-artists-activists-and-instigators/
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