The 100 Day Project #22
Invisible City - Natural American
Tucson, Arizona, USA, 2008
The 100 Day Project, Day 22
I am not a "natural American" — and I bet you aren't either. Unless you can trace your ancestry to a Native American tribe on this continent before it was "discovered" by European sailors, you come from a line of immigrants who came to this land in search of a better life.
In this moment, when hundreds of thousands of immigrants are being held in detention centers or living in hiding, it is worth asking whether your ancestry can truly protect you. Americas long history of selecting a specific group as the "one-to-hate-right-now" doesn't provide much assurance. Discrimination against an "other" — social, cultural, legal, financial, violent — has been an American tradition far longer than my lifetime.
And yet here we are again — the rhetoric louder, the raids more frequent, the detention centers filling — and history has the script for how it has ended before.
I am a white woman, born in the midwest, who came of age on the west coast surrounded by people whose languages and skin colors were vastly different from my own. I am a better human because of it. I have a curiosity and a comfort around people who are different from me.
This photograph is titled Natural American — the name of a cigarette brand whose neon sign glows red through industrial metal mesh in the lower left corner. The mesh is a metaphor for the cages and detention cells in which this country is holding human beings. Beyond it, barely visible, is a verdant landscape under blue sky and puffy clouds — a paradise obstructed. And the cigarette brand itself is a direct reference to the tobacco fields worked by enslaved people, kidnapped humans forced to immigrate in chains to build the wealth of a country that would not recognize their humanity.
I made this photograph sixteen years ago. I wish it felt dated. Instead, it is more on point than ever in my lifetime.
This photograph was made during The Invisible City, a five-week, site-specific experimental arts lab exploring public space in downtown Tucson. Co-directed by Lisa Bowden, the project was a collaboration between NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre and Kore Press, a Tucson-based feminist press. Together we brought together over 20 women artists to create texts, dances, sound pieces, film, photographs, and drawings within Tucson's urban core — envisioning and activating new workspaces out of vacant parking lots, city plazas, and sidewalks.
About the 100 Day Project: A global creative challenge where thousands of artists share a piece of their practice every single day for 100 days. I'm joining creatives around the world, and I'm excited to bring you along. Each day I'll be sharing one of my photos — some recent, some old, and some from my current project — along with the story behind it: where I was, who I was with, and why I love it.