Since 2020, I’ve been making a series called “Loiter” that involves the ongoing removal of different forms of hostile architecture. One example is the metal spikes that get attached to benches, steps, or standpipes in order to prevent people from sitting. A standpipe is a connection outside many buildings that allows the fire department to access the water supply, but people use them as impromptu forms of public seating, especially in areas of the city where there aren’t any benches.
Sometimes, property owners add devices that look like medieval contraptions to them. I exhibit these spikes as sculptures, and usually place them at roughly the same level as the standpipe they were originally installed on. Each work in the series takes a different form according to the aesthetic decisions of the developer who commissioned it or the fabricator who made it. The sculptures make the removal visible, since they’re not meant to be noticed. But the work is also about the growing series of absences across the city, and the increased possibilities for loitering.
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That means I make most of my works by walking around in the streets, then use my studio as a space to store objects or try out installations. I’m invested in highlighting the ways that forces like real estate development, or the ongoing privatization of the city, continuously encroach on different aspects of daily life. I try to find moments where those forces become visible.
I’m looking for objects that are physical forms of policing. Another example is planters that are strategically placed to prevent access to areas where there might be shelter or a covering, such as under awnings. Often, they’re not even filled with plants but, instead, bricks or cement, making them too heavy to move. I’ve been removing some of these structures and reconstituting them as actual planters, growing things inside them. For a 2022 show at Artists Space in New York called “Everything is Common,” I placed three of these planters in the windowsills and grew parsnips and carrots in them. Those reference this group of 17th-century radical Christians in England known as the Diggers. The Diggers would grow edible crops on other people’s property, since they believed that everything is communal under their god. —As told to Emily Watlington
Video Credits include:
Director/Editor/Producer: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Interviewer: Emily Watlington
Additional Footage by Tomas Abad, Karla Coté/NurPhoto, and Mastershot via Getty