Networks That Bind Us

“In order to thrive, a community can’t keep facing destruction,” exclaimed Jade Foreman, a resident and artist of Chicago’s Southside, in a video produced by Paola Aguirre Serrano and Dennis Milam of Borderless Studio. The video displayed by the architects, titled “Climate and Cultural Resilience in Chicago’s Southside,” describes the collaborative involvement of the studio in a community-based initiative to catalog and pursue participatory activation of 45 former school sites—which had been forced to close as a result of regressive civic monetary policy.

In the following presentation, Felecia Davis told stories of Black communities through computational textiles. Working at the scale of a touch, Davis illustrated the employment of copper plates to activate recordings, “integrating fragments of the past” into photographs “to construct a future.” Delving further into her work on display at MoMA, Davis added that electromagnetic transmissions, made audible through textiles, operate as a “reminder of an invisible space,” urging a recognition of the very real, unseen consequences of technological redlining and other discriminatory structures hidden in culture and architecture.