Ephemeral Monuments

Submitted by the Event Organizer

How can we make a landscape speak its secrets? Can a construction dump be a stage for performing history? Can our bodies help us process the past and envision the future? Susan Moffat has been experimenting with using installations, participatory art, and performances to reveal hidden histories in public space. In Spring 2021, students in her undergraduate course Ghosts and Visions created a mile-long tour of the history of California’s extractive industries at a former dump on San Francisco Bay called Monument to Extraction. By making outdoor sculptures, an audio tour, and augmented reality projects, the students told stories of the exploitation of Chinese immigrant labor in the dynamite industry, World War II industrialization, housing segregation, and industrial agriculture.

Moffat will speak about the project as one facet of the work of the UC Berkeley Future Histories Lab, which she directs and which offers students a chance to research and reveal Bay Area histories in partnership with local communities while earning a Certificate in Urban Humanities.

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