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Design Category
Environmental graphic design, 1998
Design firm
Community Architexts (Chicago, Illinois)
Collection
(1999) Communication Graphics: 20
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This multidisciplinary site involves the projection of large-scale texts from and onto two buildings that face each other across Chicago Avenue. These dynamic, historical billboards suggest a dialogue between factions in the community—elderly survivors of the 1932–1933 Ukranian famine (Us) and outsiders such as Soviet officials and recent Latino immigrants (Them) represented by the voices of Soviet propaganda and local Chicago schoolchildren.
This site work explored the commodification of land, crops, labor, real estate, and history itself, while drawing parallels between the historic genocide and the tenacious survival of urban children. The texts incorporated into this site activation were created and collected during writing workshops conducted at the Ukranian Cultural Center (with elderly survivors of the famine) and at Ellen Mitchell Public School (with ethnically diverse seventh-graders).