Garfield Listening Project

Garfield Listening Project

Garfield Listening Project, (Recorded audio matched and edited to video installed in Fabric sculpture, speaker in phone) installation digitally recorded oral history of Garfield area accompanied with video, documenting conversations with residence of the Garfield neighborhood. Duration: 6:13 minutes.

This work is a multi-media installation that examines a community in the East End of Pittsburgh through utilizing the mix of audio, video, and a sculptural environment to present an oral history, which documents the displacement of the Garfield neighborhood. The video piece delivers a brief non-linear edited oral history of the Pittsburgh neighborhood, Garfield. Through this work, I wanted to call attention to a situation where people are getting evicted from their houses and displaced to neighborhoods outside of the city of Pittsburgh without access public transit.

My intention with this work is to touch on the multilayered reality of city planning and the lack of transparency in events, such as “community hearings” that may not always end up bringing equal representation of the people who actually live in these neighborhoods to such meetings. I wanted to bring this conversation out in a context where some of the artists who are players in this gentrification can be aware of the strong undercurrent of socioeconomic shuffle, which strongly effects long term neighborhood residences.