Curatorial Projects > Displacement

Future Tenant Gallery

While Pittsburgh’s steel industry dissolves into the rustbelt, the global trend towards urbanization accelerates. In cities such as Santa Cruz, Bolivia the natural landscape rapidly transitions to concrete. These processes of construction and decay inevitably reveal the past. There is a decision to destroy or restore what already exists—to cover it with new materials or to let the historical remnants co-exist with the new. Although the urban developments of Pittsburgh and Santa Cruz are displaced geographically, culturally, and historically, they face the same question: In the desire for progress, how do we address the residue of time? Using source material from their particular cities, Hessler and Gonzalez Requena employ an expanded definition of drawing to distill the poetics within this political question.

Artists: Phil Hessler and Natalia Gonzalez Requena