Chronotopophobias 2021

☞ Early Text

I grew up on a street that abruptly ended in a greenish blockade of hedges. Not a cul-de-sac, that would allude to something more generous and whimsical than this bit of earth. Ours was a dead-end. I grew up in a place where these dead-ends, which not-so-cleverly disguised the borders of a segregated city, were so frequent and unremarkable that I cannot remember if there was a sign to warn off the occasional stranger. This is a place that I know well. Navigating this deeply anti-human urban plan is familiar to me. It is likely familiar to others. These kinds of city-making strategies are used all over the world where ever there a need has been determined for control. I am interested in finding an exchange across places and people. Not necessarily by sight alone but through feeling and response. What might we animate by place-ing, as it were, images of one form of design-logic onto another? Can we understand better understand the discomforts we are given to feel in one place by witnessing the impassable landscapes of another. One landscape is of course not interchangeable for another, but there are times when we sense something familiar in a place without being able to give that thing a name. These familiars, like the cities, that contain them, are by design

There are many parts of the San Francisco landscape that I have not experienced, but they sound like other places that I have known. The ways that concrete, metal, rubber, and earth are used to make the city inconvenient for some bodies, changing not only the way that we are able to feel our way through space but breaking the intimacies that we might otherwise feel towards other people, other bodies.

All cities are designed. The best places, and the worst ones, are planned with intention, and have been for some time. How can we use our bodies to sense the past, what is present in the earth beneath our feet, or in the steel and concrete we drifty by everyday?

I am interested in drawing out the stories of one place, by situating within it the sites, sights, stories of another.

☞ Later Text

Chronotopophobias (Chrono-topo-phobias) is an atlas project, a series of questions about a single place that has taken on different forms. The images in this exhibition are meditations on three places, Fairfield, Alabama, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Tulsa Oklahoma. The work is a productive struggle to see city planning and anti-humanness through the lens, quite literally, of landscape photography.

The majority of my life so far, has been lived in Fairfield, Alabama. Though I now live and work in Minnesota, Fairfield was my first education in Black geography and the work of scholars like Katherine McKittrick, Clyde Woods, and Shana Griffin have helped me see my community of elders there were my first encounters with Black geographers.

Over the past two years I have worked with my mother, to visit, document, and describe the houses that she and her sisters, my grandmother, and her grandmother lived in. Ours is an important collaboration that has given life to this project. I grew up in Fairfield, a small, majority Black satellite town of Birmingham, Alabama that began as an exclusionary, Model City for skilled white steel-workers. As our town grew during the shift from an agrarian to an extractive-industrial South, it expanded American apartheid zoning restrictions that shaped the built environment. The natural-environment was also utilized for segregation. Dead-ends, hedges, unbreaking tree-lines, and ditches mounted the landscape. I have observed these practices in other places, specifically, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota. Examining these places from above, through mapping and satellite images, is one mode of representation of visual geographic facts, but there is a difference between fact and truth. Given their present, and their pasts, I am interested in this work as a way to explore the other truths of these places and what a more experimental approach to Blackness and cartography might yield.