Witnesses---1998
Project Site:
Chicago Avenue @Leavitt Street---Ukrainian Village/ Chicago, IL
Funded by:
The City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs
Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation
The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs/ NAAP
This project was a multi-disciplinary site activation involving the projection of large-scale texts onto two buildings which face each other across Chicago Avenue. These dynamic, historic billboards suggest a dialogue between factions in the community---elderly survivors of the 1932-33 Ukrainian Famine (Us) and outsiders such as Soviet officials and recent Latino immigrants (Them) represented by the voices of Soviet propaganda and local Chicago schoolchildren.
This site work explored the commodification of land, crops, labor, real estate, and history itself, while drawing parallels between the historic genocide and the contentious survival of urban children. The texts incorporated into this site activation were created and collected during outreach workshops conducted at the Ukrainian Cultural Center and Ellen Mitchell Public School.
Xenon-projected inscriptions