I sat in chairs facing walls and began to see both the permeability and impermeability of the construction.
Portions of this work are photographed in the public arena of institutional architecture, some in private homes, others in what we think of as free-access public spaces. Using myself in this work functions to reiterate and sustain an array of tropes, of meanings through us, as representations of bodies have consequences that are lived daily. In this interaction through performance, in gestural discipline of the space, my attempt at instructive hostility and alienation responds to the image-history of the representational but it is also responds to the systematic subjugation of free will and the danger this marginalization can cause.
As the work progresses I question how public environments function to sustain and reiterate their meaning through us, through our individual sense of where we should be, or where we are permitted to be and how this is visible when the person is absent. Working and photographing, as does being, in public spaces presented questions: What is the impact of architecture on our social being? Do systems and infrastructures obtain functionality through our participation? What are the characteristics and the structure of looking? When is looking an active and complicit action?
This room is a living moment and you are living here.
Through this work, I can acknowledge that systems like architecture are conductors of the relational and participatory processes of identification and categorization, space as a revelator, a cause and a symptom. We know that our ability to live and to move, and in what condition, is critically dependent on this corporeal placement in private and public space. A placement that is determined, and predetermined, by the prevailing order of things, the prevailing order of bodies. A placement that is determined by a set of procedures working together as part of an interconnected network that includes, excludes, and ignores in ways that are relevant to and supportive of our dominant structures.
isolate to a controllable space
At the forefront of these procedures is architecture. Place is built through planning and design, spaces are not inert, they are intentional; a material environment determined and built by people holding ideology; a building, street, or neighborhood that is conceived and constructed explicitly by and for the control and performance of a code. How do we use space to describe, alienate, criminalize, isolate, reject, discriminate, and categorize entire portions of our population? In these progressing and expanding groups of large scale works I present my questions in photographs.
Within our relational, participatory, and performative relationship with public space and its intersection into private space, living is a negotiation with levels of obedience. Living is a navigation through, in, and around systems and space.
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “My understanding of the world is physical.”
In conversation with his insight and in a time when it is very clear to us that some people are free to have a non-physical understanding of the world, I use photography to ask; what spaces have we created that allow and serve this embodiment of exemption? And in a time when it is very clear to us that not everyone holds this exemption; we should ask; who lives their life concerned with the security of their body and who does not? We know who. Space and architecture tell us how.
Simone is from the northeastern United States. She received her MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. Currently living in northern New Mexico, Simone works in multiple fields. Engaging with institutional archives, architecture, and the industries of property and housing, she continues her practice in questionhood of ownership, rationae soli, and occupancy.