Latitude 32° – Navigating Home

A streetscape view of the Latitude 32° – Navigating Home installation from Calhoun Street in Charleston. Photo by Alicia Kozikowski

This project focuses on creating civic discourse on the future of Charleston, S.C., and the region. Artist Rick Lowe and I are working with regional grassroots and institutional leaders and teachers to contribute to the progressive discourse and daily life of residents in the area. They are grappling with a complex of interrelated issues: property ownership (seen through the lens of land and housing), family (seen in representations of heritage that fuel the region's economy) and education (especially public education of youth).

Lowe and I seek authentic intervention in a way that is not symbolic but actual, targeting the hidden discourse between races and the ways that inequities remain unspoken in the public realm. The project consists of nurturing the development of The Borough House Project (TBHP) as it determines its future; a youth fellowship program as part of Spoleto USA; work with Clemson Architecture School; and performances/installations that serve as models of representative civic discourse.

The Borough and Ansonborough Fields

At the corner of East Bay and Calhoun, two empty houses — the family homes of owners Catherine Braxton and Rebecca Chandler, whose recently emancipated grandfather left slavery and walked from the Drayton Hall plantation to the Ansonborough neighborhood in Charleston — are both site and the symbol for this project.

Throughout the 20th century, the Ansonborough neighborhood was a center of African-American culture, slowly eroding through gentrification until the Ansonborough Homes public housing project was razed in the early 1990s. This civic-sponsored demolition was seen very differently by blacks and whites in the region, and the absence of African-American history and voices in determining the fate of the now vacant Ansonborough Fields is symbolic of other absences throughout the region.

The Borough Project

The Borough Houses were the focal point for the 2002 show of the Spoleto Festival's "Evoking History," project, "The Memory of Land," with J. Morgan Puett's project occupying one of the houses and the other devoted to our first intervention relating to the specific history of this neighborhood that transformed this house into an installation reuniting former Borough residents and recording their interviews daily during the festival. The Borough Project (named for this section of the Ansonborough neighborhood) was conceived in collaboration with curator Tumelo Mosaka and local residents Catherine Braxton, Rebecca Chandler and Theron Snype as an installation, an oral-history collection point and a community meeting ground where former residents of Ansonborough "performed" the act of preserving local African-American heritage and questioning the politics of its erasure.

The Borough House became the first public repository for oral histories and family photographs of past Borough residents, which were donated to the archives at the Avery Research Center for African-American History to launch their collection of contemporary histories of Charleston neighborhoods. Through the efforts of community stakeholders, the artists and curators and The Community Foundation staff, The Borough Houses Project (TBHP) is evolving into a community organization that will apply for nonprofit status to provide a forum for civic participation through creative action and offer cultural opportunities and address inequities in the Lowcountry.

Clemson Architecture Center and the Future of The Borough Houses

The Borough Project helped put The Borough Houses on the map (their existence threatened, they did not appear on city planning documents at that time). In fall 2002, Clemson Architecture Center (CAC) undertook a site study, "Envisaging the Borough," with Spoleto, bringing the City Planning Dept. and Civic Design Center into the process. With an ad-hoc TBHP Board and the sister-owners, students proposed seven plans for the houses' future and brought these houses to the attention of city planners, politicians and influential local architects. In effect, through the ongoing student projects and civic discourse provoked by CAC and professors Rob Miller and Ken Huggins, The Borough Houses have now risen to a place on the civic agenda.

Latitude 32° — The Borough Project Continued

Throughout the spring of 2003, Clemson Architecture students designed a series of 18 concrete block porches to be built on the vacant Ansonborough Field as stages for a civic conversation. These porches evoked the piazzas of Charleston single-houses that were part of Lowcountry social life since the early 19th century. Constructed of yellow block, they were also reminiscent of the Ansonborough Homes, a concrete block low-income housing project that stood here till 1993. In early June, 25 local architects volunteered to build the porches, each of which was surrounded by a field of white surveyors flags that evoked the haunting absence of (or staked the future territory for?) homes on the field.

A steering committee of local partners directed the artists in a search for people who could, from a variety of perspectives and personal experiences, comment on land use, redevelopment and changes in the Charleston area — from heirs' property rights to beachfront development to the future of Charleston's East Side. On Saturday, June 7, 75 citizens/performers — from Congressman James Clyburn to Mayor Joseph P. Riley to teenagers from rural South Carolina — gathered near Ansonborough Fields in preparation for a series of spontaneous and unrehearsed conversations, informed by the uniqueness of each participant's experience. It was a gathering like no other in this area, a diversity of rich and poor and middle class, white and black and Filipino, old families and recent immigrants, young and old.

As the excited "performers" were assigned to tables with topics that had arisen during the several month organizing process, gathering storm clouds threatened. Safely tucked under a shelter in Liberty Square, the 90 participants began their conversations under the shelter where they were seated upon arrival, as a thundering summer storm broke.

Meanwhile, at The Borough Houses, the performance began for an audience of 200 hardy souls who had arrived, umbrellas in hand, for the first act. Against the haunting background of a saxophone rendition of "Summertime" by local legend Lonnie Hamilton hidden in the back house, the audience listened to seven former Borough residents reminisce on the porch about the sounds, smells and experiences of life in The Borough.

In Act Two, now diverted to the shelter at Liberty Square, the audience witnessed highly charged discussions while harried but valiant waitresses weaved through the tables to provide refreshments. Though the formality and visual quality of the planned tableau was interrupted by weather, the heart of the performance — a civic discourse of unusual candor with 300 now-mixed audience and performers in simultaneous and unrehearsed debate — was, in the eyes of several participants, perhaps even more charged by the backdrop of a summer storm.

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Suzanne Lacy is an artist, author and arts educator who is chair of fine arts at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Calif. Internationally known for her large-scale collaborative performances on social themes and urban issues. Lacy is a proponent for activism, audience engagement, and artists' roles in shaping the public agenda.

Original CAN/API publication: October 2003