Placemaking as Resistance Workshop
Compton, CA
Placemaking as Resistance was offered as a public world-building workshop during the month-long Abundance Builders Cooperate Exhibition at Moonwater Farm. It was an invitation for community members to explore a practice of reclaiming then transforming spaces as an act of resistance against hostile futures. Through collaborative exercises guided by physical work-booklets, the workshop resembled a community roundtable where a diverse group of practitioners shared approaches to creating and claiming place.
Year: 2024
Location: Moonwater Farm
Medium: Participatory workshop
Host Organization: ITS-IN-SCOPE
This workshop was inspired by a “radical placemaking field guide” I started after stumbling across an abandoned, midcentury building just north of the Bay Area. The building’s vacancy inspired ideas of space reclamation as it is connected to time reclamation, and gained further inspiration from the ABC Residency cohort who believed in radical approaches to such a mission. For this workshop, I developed a “perceptual ethnography” method to collectively investigate how we construct spatial and cultural environments. This research approach was presented in three phases: documenting personal placemaking practices, identifying patterns and key driving factors, and ultimately using these insights to envision alternative "resistant futures." The method emphasizes the connection between space, time, and identity, particularly through an Afro-pessimist lens that sees placemaking as a way to resist "preferred futures" that may perpetuate existing inequities.
