Intervention One

 

For the social activism piece project due on March 1st, my classmate Royer Zamudio and I shared a few ideas before deciding on focusing on the issue of anti-homeless architecture.  It is a problem that we have noticed during our journeys to New York from Jersey City. More specifically, in Journal Square. Journal Square has a small plaza in front of the path station, where homeless people usually sleep. This slowly changed when new condos began to appear and more well-known franchises like Chipotle and Starbucks were built, spikes were placed where the people struggling with homelessness once slept in an attempt to push them further away from the businesses. To some, they think this is a better look for our city, but we believe it is only further segregating a group of people based on class. There is a quote from the Art of Activism that notes, “Research and observation can be done everywhere, from noticing colors and forms around you to reading a celebrity news gossip magazine” (Duncombe & Lambert, p.62) I relate this quote to this project because I never really did “research” in the way most people think of when they hear the word. My research was noticing more spikes appear and benches with partitions. Things that look so out of place but have unfortunately become normalized because it is an issue that mainly impacts the displaced. This type of architecture is not a solution to end homelessness but a way to ignore the issue altogether by ostracizing people struggling with homelessness.  

For our art piece, we plan on first creating a graphic design by using photoshop. Then we will find a place that can print our design onto a shirt for us. Our design will say “Reject Hostile Architecture” with a silhouette of a mattress on top of spikes. It is not only protesting anti-homeless architecture, but it will also serve as an homage to a photo that circulated around on the internet a few years back (pictured down below). This shows that all it takes is a little creativity to reject such petty hostility. There is a second quote from The Art of Activism that states, “For some stepping off the curb may be like an epiphany, a blinding moment of clarity in which the injustices of the world are dramatically revealed.” (Duncombe & Lambert, p.18) We hope to raise some level of awareness with this piece since not people even realize this kind of architecture as it blends in so easily.

 

 

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