video, 11 minutes 34 seconds
During my time in residence at Stove Works, I became fascinated by the ongoing construction of a housing development across the street, as a site that magnifies how the logics of empire and colonization are perpetuated through gentrification and speculative real estate. The $400K homes were constructed at breakneck speed over the course of a few months. The sunny, blisteringly ignorant language of their ads and brochures purposefully obfuscated their geographical placement: a working-class mixed residential and industrial neighborhood near a juvenile detention court and a national cemetery. I made a performance work in response to this phenomenon (The Legacy of Enclosure, Chattanooga Noise Night, October 2024). Afterward, I decided to continue my embodied research on this site, and weave it into a larger body of research on loss as the heritage of the dispossessed.

This brand-new video work was made in the last few days of my time at Stove Works � and only made possible by the incredible creative latitude of the residency, and resources provided by fellow residents. It is set on the concrete pad adjacent to the workshops; you can see the active construction site and cemetery in the background. I position myself as Aporia � a fantastical iteration of the Greek goddess of want and poverty. I rise out of a black sheet, and utilize refuse from the site and Stove Works to reclaim place and space. These objects include rusted metal siding and an auger, and golden streamers left behind by a previous resident. My ritual actions with these objects range from the protective to the aggressive, as a way of uplifting what is left behind and fighting back against the march of "progress." Later, I don a shirt with the words MAROON MARAUD DEFRAUD, and perform a farewell dance in a grove of trees nearer to the construction site, attempting to imbue this space with power and ensure its memory before it is erased. I end by expressing the deep pain and frustration of watching this cycle of displacement over and over through facial expressions that suggest a curse on the development process.