Guardians: Care-taking and Place-making on St. James Court, 2011
Installation with four handmade wooden cabinets (each 36" x 24" x 10"), found objects, telephones with interview excerpts, chromolithographs on Kozo (seen through peepholes).
Guardians: Care-taking and Place-making on St. James Court
"In modern landscapes everywhere, people persist in asking, 'What happened here?' The answers they supply... should not be taken lightly, for what people make of their places is closely connected to what they make of themselves as members of society and inhabitants of the earth."
- Keith Basso, "Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache"
Guardians: Care-taking and Place-making on St. James Court explores this definition of personal identity and connection to place as a person "revives and revises" the history of his or her own home.
St. James Court, a circular row of Victorian houses in Louisville, Kentucky, is an example of such a historical stage. Buildings and structures on the Court allow a constantly shifting population of directors to bring the past back into being, again and again.
Through a series of interviews with the residents of four homes on St. James Court, I researched place-making within a site whose history manifests itself in many ways.
© 2008 - 2011 by Susanna Crum