Competition 2016: Shortlisted in the category Research
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project - Narratives of Displacement and Resistance
Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, 2016
The Narratives of Displacement and Resistance by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a collaborative endeavor to house oral histories and video work on an interactive map of Bay Area urban displacement. The background red eviction dots of the map represent sites of displacement between 1997 and the present. The blue bubbles layered on top are all sites upon which a volunteer of our collective recorded a narrative story. The oral history and video pieces include stories of forced dispossession, neighborhood transformation, and cultural loss, but also narratives of resistance. As such, the map functions as both a neighborhood and cultural archive, and as an activist tool for resistance. Additionally, the map functions to muddy the reductive nature of quantitatively-based mapping, as many of the stories included in the map both confirm and trouble what big data narratives. Collectively, the stories invoke the complexity of gentrification and urban transformation, yet nevertheless highlighting some of the negative effects of late racial capitalism.
The map exists online and is available to the public at www.antievictionmappingproject.net/narratives.html. Additionally, we have painted a mural version of in Clarion Alley, which features a call-the-wall function so that viewers can listen to nine of the oral histories featured in portrait form on the wall.
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This work is made of the love and labor of Anti-Eviction Mapping Project volunteers.