Dirt palace: Feminist SEPARATIST commune?
Context
In imagining a right to the city, I was immediately drawn to the periphery. I was struck with an inclination to explore how city dwellers in the urban underground engage in place making, in the very places that are not necessarily made for them. While parsing out how I might create a cogent manifesto that articulates a right to the city constructed by those who operate outside dominant hegemony, I sought out the antitheses, perhaps not completely linear antagonists, but certainly oppositional forces.
Patriarchy: Feminist. Capitalist: Commune. Developer: Artist. Conformist: Separatist
When I entered Dirt Palace, a feminist artist collective in Olneyville, I explained the banal logistics of why I was there. I was curious about how the establishment, or anti-establishment envisioned their work within the auspices of the right to the city. I was unprepared when Pippi Zornoza, who has lived in the Palace for 15 years, asked, “What do you mean by the right to the city?” As the question hung in the late afternoon light of the palace’s kitchen, I realized I had no real idea. I glanced quickly at the armoire-cum-prairie dog habitat, hoping one of the alien animals would pop up with a cue card. I realized that I’d speaking in circuitous circles, spewing lofty and nebulous theorizations about my preconceptions about how the nature of Dirt Palace was inherently an articulation of a right to the city.
Once I discovered that seven radical women lived in a formerly abandoned library space in Olneyville, I simply assumed they were seizing a right to the city that historically had not been available to women, to artists, and more broaldy, to the subaltern. But these were my renderings. I had imagined a sort of squatter’s utopia that proudly burned bras and dumped the ashes on the grounds of city hall. This is not the case. Dirt Palace is a complicated place. The women have invested in the space with a savvy foresight that acknowledges the necessity of obtaining a legal right to the building they call home in order to make the project sustainable. They now own the building outright. For them, living in the underground is not necessarily synonymous with living outside legal framework, although that has been their reality for some years. For nearly a decade and a half, they have carefully identified how the city, zoning laws, and building codes, could be carefully navigated in order to create a contentious space that is now able to exist as underground, but not clandestine.
My nebulous floating of the words Right to the City did not stick at the outset. They were not established within lived experience, but were a mere projection of expectation and assumption.
I can not articulate what it means to live in Dirt Palace, to make meaning centered around art, feminism, and a radical politic. Yet the women of Dirt Palace can. They welcomed me into their home and heads, parsing out what it means to hold multiplicities within identities. Each woman grappled with her position in the space, neighborhood, and city. The palace itself is a convergence of urban forces. It is at once public art display and convergence point, a private residence, a formerly illegal live-work space, an established staple in the community, a potential gentrifying force, an affordable home, and an enacted resistance against any attempt to paint it as either myopia or panacea.
Perhaps Pippi's question, though, is better answered by Lefebvre, for in his conceptualization, Dirt Palace is quite literally a lived articulation of the The Right to the City. "To these anthropological needs which are socially elaborate (that is, sometimes separated, sometimes joined together, here compressed and there hypertrophied), can be added specific needs which are not satisfied by those commercial and cultural infrastructures which are somewhat parsimoniously taken into account by planners. This refers to the need to for creative activity, for the oeuvre (not only of products and consumable material goods), of the need for information, symbolism, the imaginary and play" [1]. Dirt Palace, then, is indeed forging a right to the city as it fills the crevices left by zoning laws and city ordinances with Papier-mâché masks and shared menstrual calendars.
Foucault conceptualizes the Middle Aged understanding of spaces as hierarchal. “...sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places…”[2]. These oppositional relations melded as the manifestation of emplacement, a theory that is both deeply relational and situational on its face. Dirt Palace, in many ways subverts this hierarchical delineation of emplacement. It smashes polarities by embodying the antithetical simultaneously, by degrading those delineations and distinctions that Foucault assumes. “There are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.” [2]. Yet Dirt Palace exists on the cusp of these spaces, in a realm that is not sacrosanct, and thus, liberated to forge other, alternative space.
These are the interviews that best enumerate the complexities, hypocrisies, idiosyncrasies, and rich histories of crafting a right to the city from the inside out and back again.
In imagining a right to the city, I was immediately drawn to the periphery. I was struck with an inclination to explore how city dwellers in the urban underground engage in place making, in the very places that are not necessarily made for them. While parsing out how I might create a cogent manifesto that articulates a right to the city constructed by those who operate outside dominant hegemony, I sought out the antitheses, perhaps not completely linear antagonists, but certainly oppositional forces.
Patriarchy: Feminist. Capitalist: Commune. Developer: Artist. Conformist: Separatist
When I entered Dirt Palace, a feminist artist collective in Olneyville, I explained the banal logistics of why I was there. I was curious about how the establishment, or anti-establishment envisioned their work within the auspices of the right to the city. I was unprepared when Pippi Zornoza, who has lived in the Palace for 15 years, asked, “What do you mean by the right to the city?” As the question hung in the late afternoon light of the palace’s kitchen, I realized I had no real idea. I glanced quickly at the armoire-cum-prairie dog habitat, hoping one of the alien animals would pop up with a cue card. I realized that I’d speaking in circuitous circles, spewing lofty and nebulous theorizations about my preconceptions about how the nature of Dirt Palace was inherently an articulation of a right to the city.
Once I discovered that seven radical women lived in a formerly abandoned library space in Olneyville, I simply assumed they were seizing a right to the city that historically had not been available to women, to artists, and more broaldy, to the subaltern. But these were my renderings. I had imagined a sort of squatter’s utopia that proudly burned bras and dumped the ashes on the grounds of city hall. This is not the case. Dirt Palace is a complicated place. The women have invested in the space with a savvy foresight that acknowledges the necessity of obtaining a legal right to the building they call home in order to make the project sustainable. They now own the building outright. For them, living in the underground is not necessarily synonymous with living outside legal framework, although that has been their reality for some years. For nearly a decade and a half, they have carefully identified how the city, zoning laws, and building codes, could be carefully navigated in order to create a contentious space that is now able to exist as underground, but not clandestine.
My nebulous floating of the words Right to the City did not stick at the outset. They were not established within lived experience, but were a mere projection of expectation and assumption.
I can not articulate what it means to live in Dirt Palace, to make meaning centered around art, feminism, and a radical politic. Yet the women of Dirt Palace can. They welcomed me into their home and heads, parsing out what it means to hold multiplicities within identities. Each woman grappled with her position in the space, neighborhood, and city. The palace itself is a convergence of urban forces. It is at once public art display and convergence point, a private residence, a formerly illegal live-work space, an established staple in the community, a potential gentrifying force, an affordable home, and an enacted resistance against any attempt to paint it as either myopia or panacea.
Perhaps Pippi's question, though, is better answered by Lefebvre, for in his conceptualization, Dirt Palace is quite literally a lived articulation of the The Right to the City. "To these anthropological needs which are socially elaborate (that is, sometimes separated, sometimes joined together, here compressed and there hypertrophied), can be added specific needs which are not satisfied by those commercial and cultural infrastructures which are somewhat parsimoniously taken into account by planners. This refers to the need to for creative activity, for the oeuvre (not only of products and consumable material goods), of the need for information, symbolism, the imaginary and play" [1]. Dirt Palace, then, is indeed forging a right to the city as it fills the crevices left by zoning laws and city ordinances with Papier-mâché masks and shared menstrual calendars.
Foucault conceptualizes the Middle Aged understanding of spaces as hierarchal. “...sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places…”[2]. These oppositional relations melded as the manifestation of emplacement, a theory that is both deeply relational and situational on its face. Dirt Palace, in many ways subverts this hierarchical delineation of emplacement. It smashes polarities by embodying the antithetical simultaneously, by degrading those delineations and distinctions that Foucault assumes. “There are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.” [2]. Yet Dirt Palace exists on the cusp of these spaces, in a realm that is not sacrosanct, and thus, liberated to forge other, alternative space.
These are the interviews that best enumerate the complexities, hypocrisies, idiosyncrasies, and rich histories of crafting a right to the city from the inside out and back again.
Interviews with the people of the Palace
Xander Marro/ on beginnings, building, and legality.
http://xandermarro.com/index.html
EP Can you tell me about the difficulties of building legality?
XM Right, so, I’m sure you understand for a building to be a legal building it has to fit within zoning ordinances and then there’s also building code laws where whenever anything is a change of use, or if anything changes, it has to fit into what the building code is. In Providence that got very tricky because after the Station nightclub fire, all of the building codes, mainly all of the fire stuff, became the most robust laws in the country. You want safety to happen, but it was, I think, a little bit of overkill. So they finally started to go back and do some reinterpretations. So when we first decided we were going to try to become legal, we used the Rauschenberg grant money to hire an architect/ code consultant to do a report. And it was actually super discouraging because we had zoning issues. We could go and try to get a variance, but it’s just unknown. You open the can of worms and suddenly you just don’t know. Like if there was a problem neighbor that said,
"No, I don’t think mixed use." Bad things could happen. And the other was all of the code compliance stuff and it was very uncertain if we would need to put sprinklers in, which would just be cost prohibitive for us.
So basically the whole city did a rezoning process. I had worked with Bonny in planning and development before. I said to her, "Hey Bonny, as you’re rezoning the entire city can we look and see if it’s possible for our use to actually fit?" And we looked and she seemed very willing to help us, but at the same time it didn’t really seem like she needed to. They had already planned to make this entire area, like to just loosen up how the categories of zoning were formed so that mixed use would totally fit into this kind of commercial corridor.
EP Just to backtrack a little, this was formerly an abandoned library, and then did you guys just stumble upon it?
XM So the building was built around 1900. Then there was a lot of divestment in the area. First when the textile industry left. I don’t know when it really started to go into disrepair, but then the Americans with Disabilities Act went through. It was always retail on the first floor so the library was on the second floor and there were no lifts or accessibility. Once people decided that, you know, people who have limited mobility should be able to access public services, they were like, oh maybe this isn’t the right way to do this. So the library moved down the street. Somewhere along the line there was a fire, the building fell into disrepair, they chopped off the top of it. The flat roof in New England is always a bad idea.
My sense is that the roof probably leaked from when they first started doing that. When we got here, the thing that had been here last was a church. There were a million church pews up on the second floor that there are still remnants of. It’s hard to say exactly how long it had been empty by the time we got here. Basically some guy owned it who had bought it at a tax sale, and his company was called Equity Finders LLC and they just split buildings, that was their deal. So we had initially looked at, I had a friend that wanted to do a bookstore project, and we looked at this kitchen space, which I think was just $700 a month, and eventually in talking to the landlord, he was like, well if you pay me $400 extra bucks, you could have the whole building for $1100 a month or something.
And that’s when the idea of trying to figure out how to buy it came it. There was just a sense that if artists didn’t figure out how to have an ownership stake in the community they were gonna be pushed out, there were a lot of venues that were getting shut down. The usual stuff where people who are vulnerable because they don’t own or invest in stuff, and all the sudden someone else realizes that it’s valuable, and they’re pushed out. So there was an awareness of that and also the sense that doing an experiment that was about women building something together was something that i think would be really great for the arts community. It’s interesting because now I feel like Providence is filled with amazing women artists, but 15 years ago, especially the music scene and the underground was very male dominated. And a big part of the project was always building out the space with our hands. I had lived in a warehouse space before, and it was the kind of thing where my mom always had saws, I’d grown up around saws, but people would assume that I didn’t know how to use them. People would be like, “Let me show you how to use that circular saw!” and I’d be like,"I know." It’s just, you get sick of that, so it made more sense for us to do it.
EP So has it always been an all women’s collective?
XM Ya, sometimes there are subletters and sometimes there are significant others and stuff like that, but it’s always been. So that’s kind of the origins.
EP So then you bought it?
XM Ya so that’s kind of complicated too. So we had initially come together, so many people and models pushed in the direction of a not for profit model, like AS220 is a huge example, and the way they’ve organized. So everyone was just like, that’s the way! So we started out trying to do it as a not for profit, and somewhere along the line realized that wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted to have more control, we didn’t want to have some outside board who was deciding who was going to be here, we wanted it to be home, we wanted it to feel more intimate. But there was also the fact that we had jumped into stuff really fast, and there were a couple of women who really wanted the not for profit thing, and so it was coming to this place of being like, oh actually we kind of want different things, we have different visions, which in retrospect is really simple. But we were really young.
When you’re 23-25 and haven’t dealt with these kind of business things it all gets personal and it got messy and it was very painful, but we got a divorce. We, they, applied for and got a decent grant, it was like $40,000. They took that and bought a building up the street which has kind of fizzled. Started this organization called the Hive Archive, and that never quite took root. I think in part just because the people who had decided that’s what they wanted just weren’t super committed to being here in the long run, I think that part of the reason this has worked is because Pippi and I have been like, we’re here, this is our life’s work, sometimes it sucks, but mostly it’s awesome and we’re gonna pound the pavement and make it work. And I feel the same way about AS-220, because Bert was there for the whole time. I think there’s just a vulnerability, because obviously organizations can change hands and evolve and grow. It’s like a business like any other business, and businesses are super vulnerable for the first five years. So right now we’re kind of at that moment of being like, could we step back or how does that work? Reshuffling.
So anyway, we decided that wasn’t the right model, we kind of reconfigured. Some people who had been on our board were really supportive, and actually really supportive of us being like, no we don’t want this anymore, and there were a lot of people who actually got it, and people in the community who really asked us to think about the not for profit, and were like, here’s another way you could do that. We were so lucky there were so many older people who were really smart who had our backs during that time who really helped us figure out a lot of different pieces of the puzzle. So one of the women who had been on the board had a small business, it was like a jewelry retailer, and she had gotten a loan from the city, from the PEDP, which was the Providence Economic Development Partnership, and she thought this would be a good project. There was also a lot of political will in the city to help artists, so it seemed like good timing. She made some introductions. And we had known this one guy John who worked for the city who had been really supportive, he just had a general interest in this area. He grew up in Olneyville. So he helped us put together paperwork, we got a volunteer accountant, did the whole business plan and applied for a mortgage from the city and got the loan to buy the building from the city.
EP So the loan is from the city?
XM Ya, was from the city, it was a ten year commercial loan so we paid it off. We own it outright now. It was also very awkward because the city held the mortgage. It wasn’t legal at all, everyone knew what was going on, but that’s also been kind of the magic of Providence. It’s the curse and the corrupt. In some ways it really works. All the art stuff really happened because code enforcement wasn’t doing their job, but on the other hand you see how bad things have gotten because people were allowed to not do jobs or show up or whatever. So that’s the story.
EP As of now, with the public window display, is that something that folks inside the collective do?
XM Ya, well we don’t make it, we curate it. We try to do one a month.
So how a lot of our organization structure works, each person who’s here, how we kind of conceptualize rent is that there’s a dollar amount, and that basically covers, when there was the mortgage, the mortgage. I mean the mortgage was honestly never the big thing, s it’s the taxes the insurance, the utilities. Now we have a small amount that goes towards capital improvement, so we’ve been able to do stuff like replace the windows, a bunch of other stuff. So everyone’s expected to financially contribute, but then also there’s a part of it that’s also labor contributions that are spelled out in the occupancy and consciousness agreement. So everyone has to do one work day a month that’s eight hours. We have meetings once a week, everyone has a chore, a kitchen day, and then everyone’s an overlord of some aspect of running the bigger picture things. So I’m the communications overlord. Definitely with the self management there can be room for initiative but then also there’s no one over your shoulder. Someone runs the print shop, someone runs the window, someone runs the library, sometimes there’s been a woodshop person. It just kind of depends. There’s the capitalism overlord, which just means selling stuff on etsy. So that’s kind of how labor is distributed. Usually when we go to deal with something like the window, there’s a management structure. There’s a letter that each artist gets. We usually will book a window like almost a whole year out. So we’re all like, I think this person would be cool, I think this person would be a great idea, we come to the table, we have a bunch of ideas we schedule a year out, and then the person who manages it meets them, sends them the stuff, follows up. You know, there’s a decent amount of just day to day things.
EP While everyone is an overlord, they’re all still making their own art?
XM Yep, yep. Everyone’s got a different approach to their practice. So there have been people who run their own small businesses and live off their art and that’s their approach, and that’s something they’ve started here and do. And that’s awesome. Then there are people who are like, I don’t want to have to deal with the pressure of my art supporting me, I have outside jobs, and I do my art as the thing that’s whatever. A part of our meetings, weekly meetings is talking about art. So at each meeting there’s one person who presents what they’re working on. That’s how we keep in touch. And there’s a lot that’s informal and organic, and I think that’s honestly in some ways the most powerful. A lot of stuff happens in the kitchen. Or last week I was in the studio and Jean was in the studio, and I was like which one of these things!?! Or like, hey I got five minutes to finish this can you give me quick feedback? That’s part of the idea of a space like this is that so much work as artists is pretty isolated or isolating, so just being in proximity and what that kind of allows for. I do freelance and sometimes I feel like it would be nice to have people around more. But I do also think it’s ultimately the mix of different approaches, and some people being like, I don’t want to sell my stuff, and I don’t want to do contract work. It actually does work really well with people who are hustling all the time and doing more commercial things or whatever. So it’s a blend.
EP As far as being apart of Providence itself, how does that work?
XM Again, sort of organically. So I think I’m going to back up and talk about it philosophically. There’s spectrum of sort of individual vs. cooperative, and I think that there’s cooperatives where the individuals support this umbrella ideology that is the collective. I think that we’re kind of the inverse of that where there’s the space/collective there as a platform to support individual visions or individual ideas, so there’s some sense of a shared politics. But for the most part it’s been really important to us that people come at things from different perspectives, and are able to bring who they are and what their interests are to the table. So there have been people that have been really involved in neighborhood stuff and then people who are kind of like, I’m in my studio all day. I think we air on the side of wanting to work with people who want to be in the neighborhood or have more of a sense of civic engagement, but then there’s also the fact that Pippi and I are here for the long haul, and the two of us I think air on that side.
EP How did you and Pippi connect?
XM It was kind of just magical. We didn’t know each other that well when we started. We’d only been working together on this project for about a year. Basically we didn’t know how the building was going to get bought and the two of us were like, we want to be here long haul. So it was kind of this commitment. Other people were into the idea but they didn’t want to have their name on it, and they didn’t want to be on the hook. And we also had families. We had to put down $10,000 or something like that, so we both borrowed some money, and I had a decent job at that time. In retrospect, it’s like we had to come up with $5,000 each, not that crazy. But it was also a little crazy for us. And for other people involved it was just like, people were at an age or phase where that wasn’t even feasible. We were ready and it made sense, and we had always thought in the early days that other people would join us, that other people would buy in. And we had this idea that having an almost 50/50 balance of long term, short term would work, and then at some point we just gave up. We work together too well. Someone else entering into this with us just wouldn’t make sense, we’ve been in it too long. So we switched our philosophy about that. The idea is if people who are here want to be super engaged that’s awesome, and there have been a lot of people who have run with that. So someone who lived here started the Olneyville Neighborhood Association which is still very active. And I’ve been on the board of Olneyville Housing, which is now One Neighborhood Builders, for thirteen years.
EP Wait, someone who lived here started ONA?
XM Ya, Paulina. Then I was the second generation. So Paulina, this woman, Dana, who worked at Olneyville Housing and Leandra Martinez wrote a grant together to formalize community organizing in Olneyville. They got the grant, they kind of informally had been a group at St. Teresa’s that was doing organizing. They kind of began working with them, but then there was this pot of money and it got a little weird. But then Paulina left town, and I felt really compelled to help with the stuff that she had been doing. Dana also left town, this guy Norman moved in, and so then Norman, me and Leandra all formally incorporated ONA. We got that office right down the street because it had been in the church. It was kind of a coup to move it from the church, and then the church ended up closing down like three years later. St. Teresa’s, where it had been before was awesome. The priest, Father Titro, was kind of a saint. He’s still in the neighborhood too, he lives on Appleton Street. He’s very cool. So there’s been a lot of people that have been messy, and politics, and that’s just the nature of community stuff. But ya, it’s interesting, at this point in time we’re probably the small business, besides from the wiener joint that’s been there for seventy years, we’re probably one of the longest running businesses in the square.
EP So people can weave webs of connection with Providence as they wish?
XM Yaya, another sort of interesting org that started here is Urban Greens, which is the food co-op. Robyn, her and some of the people that started White Electric started that. Urban Greens was run here, we had a big freezer and people would come and pick up their stuff for awhile. Books through Bars was here for awhile in this library. Because if someone’s like, hey I have this idea and I want to do this thing, we’re glad to make it happen. AS-220 is a great model for that. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to meet Bert, but if there’s anything he’s great at, it’s listening to young people have crazy ideas, and being like, Ok, you should do that, what do you need from me to make that happen? Not that they have a ton of resources or can support everything, but they’re very good about sharing relationships. I think a lot of the introductions to other people in the city came from AS220, so that was a big important piece of being able to do what we do. And I’ve also felt like AS-220 does something that’s able to meet such an important community need that it’s allowed for people that have more specialized ideas or visions. Like, how about this feminist separatist commune? Well we could do this.
EP It's been quite a journey from securing the space to now, when did you start building?
XM We got in the building July 1 of 2000 and we started to build walls in spring of 2001. A lot of the early years we were here were the Bush years, which were super traumatic for everyone. This was on the eve of the war, we organized the anti-war poster freakout and basically made a whole map of the city and made anti-war posters, and we all met at midnight and took different parts of the city to go hit with wheat paste and the posters. It was actually pretty effective and awesome. There was a lot of renovation for the first bunch of years. The first winter was brutal. We didn’t try to heat the second floor. We had a refrigerator, you didn’t need to use it, you didn’t need to put your vegetables away because it was too cold. It was really crazy at first, and it’s really nice to not have things be so crazy now.
Olivia Horvath/ on moving in, moving out, moving back in, and why.
http://cargocollective.com/ohorvath
OH When I moved in for the first time, I was very young, compared to the age of the people who were here, and the environment just felt, you know it’s very based on who’s here at the time. I was looking for something a little bit different. I thought maybe I want to try not living in collectives for a little bit, because I’d been living in different collectives for a while, and it had been feeling like a more private space, which was cool, but it wasn’t really what I wanted. I really appreciate this space is very defined by who’s here. Right now it feels like more of a public space and that feels very good to me. So I moved out for a little bit, and I was like, this is all right, but I kind of miss community, and I miss having work space, and I miss the resources here.
EP can you talk a little bit more about that idea of public space?
OH Ya totally, so when I moved out we were not a legal live space so it was harder to focus on having shows. We would have some public events but it would be rare, and it really depends on whose here and their energy. We weren’t having outside artists use the screen printing room or the band room as much as we have in other times. And right now because of whose here and where they want to put their energy, we are having more live shows, more touring artists, having more people come and use the screen printing room. That feels good to me because we just have so much space here. It’s totally understandable if people are here and want to focus on their private practice, it’s not an obligation to be putting energy into hosting events. But it feels like where this situated in terms of its history, it feels really important to me for it to be more accessible.
EP As far as where it’s situated, it is very much right in Olneyville square. Do you feel as though any part of it will eventually be open? Will people be able to come through as a kind of public gallery, or will it remain a more private space for collective artists that are living and working here?
OH Well we have been talking about having more open studio or open house nights. We do a lot of tours; anyone can contact us for a tour. But because it is our living space and our work space, we can’t pay someone to be there permanently, and we have a lot of expensive shit, we don’t want to have it open. But we do want people to know what it is. Xander is working right now on curtains that will go over our display window downstairs when there isn’t something installed that will explain a little bit about the history of the building and what it is, because there’s not so much signage. It was harder when we were more tenuous legally. So I’m excited about that. People are like, oh the weird window. But I'm excited for people to pass and identify it a little bit more.
EP Could you talk about how dirt palace has changed from when you first lived here to now?
OH Sure. When I first moved in it was already all built out and Xander and Pippi have been here for a really long time holding it down and really connecting with the community, being parts of Olneyville Neighborhood Association and Olneyville housing, so I haven’t really seen a lot. It’s been pretty stable the entire time I’ve been here. Just watching the energy change feels really exciting, like I love and miss a lot of people who have left. It also felt good to leave and then come back and see different energy, different projects, and people connecting with the city in different ways.
I wanted to talk a little bit though about how it feels complicated to be a white person in a mostly white collective in the middle of Olneyville. I don’t have a lot of concrete thoughts about it. It was one of the reasons I left probably, although it didn’t feel like a necessity to leave, but I was feeling discomfort. I think becoming legal and efforts to move towards more openness feels good. When there have been some feelings of gatekeeping in the past, it has felt necessary to stay alive as a collective when there’s been tenuous legal stuff. It feels better to know that there are more chances for involvement.
EP Have there been any efforts to involve women of color or folks that live in Olneyville in the collective?
OH There have been and are women of color who live here, and it’s not necessarily a collective initiative to recruit women of color, but I think being involved with Olneyville has been important since they started the collective, and there have been people who’ve lived here who have more or less involvement with the city, people work really closely with the Olneyville Neighborhood Association.
EP And is that partnership with the Olneyville Neighborhood Association still strong?
OH I know Xander’s still on the board of Olneyville Housing. I believe she helped started Olneyville Neighborhood Association, but I don’t know all of the details there. It is on a person by person basis. We do, on our work days, we’ll participate in neighborhood initiatives, clean ups and stuff. Also with the window, we try to have half local artists and artists groups, NUA has done windows, the Olneyville Children’s theater’s project. We do have a lot of local artists, and people who focus on history.
EP Would you say dirt palace is integrated into the fabric of the neighborhood, or separate and isolated?
OH In some ways it is isolated. It is a private space in many ways. But it’s also been here for a very long time and I think there are ways that it being here and it being visible is a gentrifying force, but I also feel like there is a lot of potential, and a lot of potential that’s been acted on to use this space to support what’s going on in the neighborhood.
EP As far as the tension between it being a gentrifying force and a collective, is there any push for it to be an affordable housing space, or is it more focused on being a place where artists can commune and share resources?
OH It’s hard for me to say again because Pippi and Xander really act as landlords, but I think it is affordable for what it is, and I think we’ve always worked really hard to keep costs down which is why we do our own electric and do our own plumbing. But I used to live in Baltimore where I really felt the racial divide, and the tension between the expensive art schools that were basically feeding right into the arts scene. It felt very white and very divided, and very aggressive in terms of gentrifying. But I feel like here there’s just more artists from Providence who grew up here. I feel like here there’s more support and a less violent division.
http://cargocollective.com/ohorvath
OH When I moved in for the first time, I was very young, compared to the age of the people who were here, and the environment just felt, you know it’s very based on who’s here at the time. I was looking for something a little bit different. I thought maybe I want to try not living in collectives for a little bit, because I’d been living in different collectives for a while, and it had been feeling like a more private space, which was cool, but it wasn’t really what I wanted. I really appreciate this space is very defined by who’s here. Right now it feels like more of a public space and that feels very good to me. So I moved out for a little bit, and I was like, this is all right, but I kind of miss community, and I miss having work space, and I miss the resources here.
EP can you talk a little bit more about that idea of public space?
OH Ya totally, so when I moved out we were not a legal live space so it was harder to focus on having shows. We would have some public events but it would be rare, and it really depends on whose here and their energy. We weren’t having outside artists use the screen printing room or the band room as much as we have in other times. And right now because of whose here and where they want to put their energy, we are having more live shows, more touring artists, having more people come and use the screen printing room. That feels good to me because we just have so much space here. It’s totally understandable if people are here and want to focus on their private practice, it’s not an obligation to be putting energy into hosting events. But it feels like where this situated in terms of its history, it feels really important to me for it to be more accessible.
EP As far as where it’s situated, it is very much right in Olneyville square. Do you feel as though any part of it will eventually be open? Will people be able to come through as a kind of public gallery, or will it remain a more private space for collective artists that are living and working here?
OH Well we have been talking about having more open studio or open house nights. We do a lot of tours; anyone can contact us for a tour. But because it is our living space and our work space, we can’t pay someone to be there permanently, and we have a lot of expensive shit, we don’t want to have it open. But we do want people to know what it is. Xander is working right now on curtains that will go over our display window downstairs when there isn’t something installed that will explain a little bit about the history of the building and what it is, because there’s not so much signage. It was harder when we were more tenuous legally. So I’m excited about that. People are like, oh the weird window. But I'm excited for people to pass and identify it a little bit more.
EP Could you talk about how dirt palace has changed from when you first lived here to now?
OH Sure. When I first moved in it was already all built out and Xander and Pippi have been here for a really long time holding it down and really connecting with the community, being parts of Olneyville Neighborhood Association and Olneyville housing, so I haven’t really seen a lot. It’s been pretty stable the entire time I’ve been here. Just watching the energy change feels really exciting, like I love and miss a lot of people who have left. It also felt good to leave and then come back and see different energy, different projects, and people connecting with the city in different ways.
I wanted to talk a little bit though about how it feels complicated to be a white person in a mostly white collective in the middle of Olneyville. I don’t have a lot of concrete thoughts about it. It was one of the reasons I left probably, although it didn’t feel like a necessity to leave, but I was feeling discomfort. I think becoming legal and efforts to move towards more openness feels good. When there have been some feelings of gatekeeping in the past, it has felt necessary to stay alive as a collective when there’s been tenuous legal stuff. It feels better to know that there are more chances for involvement.
EP Have there been any efforts to involve women of color or folks that live in Olneyville in the collective?
OH There have been and are women of color who live here, and it’s not necessarily a collective initiative to recruit women of color, but I think being involved with Olneyville has been important since they started the collective, and there have been people who’ve lived here who have more or less involvement with the city, people work really closely with the Olneyville Neighborhood Association.
EP And is that partnership with the Olneyville Neighborhood Association still strong?
OH I know Xander’s still on the board of Olneyville Housing. I believe she helped started Olneyville Neighborhood Association, but I don’t know all of the details there. It is on a person by person basis. We do, on our work days, we’ll participate in neighborhood initiatives, clean ups and stuff. Also with the window, we try to have half local artists and artists groups, NUA has done windows, the Olneyville Children’s theater’s project. We do have a lot of local artists, and people who focus on history.
EP Would you say dirt palace is integrated into the fabric of the neighborhood, or separate and isolated?
OH In some ways it is isolated. It is a private space in many ways. But it’s also been here for a very long time and I think there are ways that it being here and it being visible is a gentrifying force, but I also feel like there is a lot of potential, and a lot of potential that’s been acted on to use this space to support what’s going on in the neighborhood.
EP As far as the tension between it being a gentrifying force and a collective, is there any push for it to be an affordable housing space, or is it more focused on being a place where artists can commune and share resources?
OH It’s hard for me to say again because Pippi and Xander really act as landlords, but I think it is affordable for what it is, and I think we’ve always worked really hard to keep costs down which is why we do our own electric and do our own plumbing. But I used to live in Baltimore where I really felt the racial divide, and the tension between the expensive art schools that were basically feeding right into the arts scene. It felt very white and very divided, and very aggressive in terms of gentrifying. But I feel like here there’s just more artists from Providence who grew up here. I feel like here there’s more support and a less violent division.
Allison Nitkiewicz/ on projection, neighbors, and fortress.
http://www.alisonnitkiewicz.com/
EP Can you give me a little background about how you got into the palace?
AN I have been living here for almost exactly three years now. I moved in right after I graduated from RISD. I love living here, it’s amazing. I had applied before but we have a no student policy. I didn’t know that, but I applied and now I've lived here ever since.
EP Can you touch on how living in Dirt Palace allows you to create a public space, or do you feel like it’s a more private, communal collective?
AN Ya I mean in some ways it’s like a very public space, and in other ways it’s like a fortress. When you’re not living here, it can feel unapproachable. But I think that also has to do with the people living here. I feel like we’re becoming more public because we just got our certificate of occupancy last year. So for a long time security was a concern with making sure the police or the fire department didn’t find out that people were actually living here. So I feel like since that we’ve become a lot more able to publicly say that we’re having an event. We don’t have to be as covert about things. Me and Daniela, who lives here, are starting a project called WDPRI. She fixed the speaker out front, so we’re doing a projection and having a show on Thursday, where she’s doing an album release and I’m doing a film screening and we’re having some other people. We’re going to broadcast it over the square, like live broadcast it. Which is kind of crazy.
EP So do you think that will bring people in?
AN Maybe, I don’t know. It’s a super public area. I walk out my front door and I’m in outside. I don’t know, it’s cool to have…that idea, I think we want to do eventually over the summer do radio shows where we just play into the square. It was kind of triggered by this place Cricket wireless, and the non-stop music they play all day, like some really good music and some horrible music, anything they want. And we’re like, why can’t we do that? And so that’s going to be a public thing.
EP Do you think that will speak to the window display?
AN Maybe, I think that’s an eventual idea, we want to be able to do sound stuff with the window display, and that is being renovated this week or next week.
EP So you’ve lived in Providence for 7 years. What’s your conceptualization of this space in Olneyville? Or how the neighborhood and Dirt Palace are in communication, or aren’t?
AN Well before I even lived in the dirt palace I was involved in various spaces that are in the area, like when building 13 was a space I had a space in there when I was twenty or something. So I’ve been in Olneyville for awhile, and I think that in some ways artists moving into a neighborhood is often the first wave of gentrification, and we’ve been here for like fifteen years and it’s crazy to see just in the time that I’ve been in Olneyville, how much there has been like this revitalized nightlife…in some ways I want to be critical of my place here because I am an artist who is educated, white, and I decided to move into an area that is majority immigrants and people who are not college educated white people. But I feel like it’s important in the Dirt Palace to be friendly to our neighbors. I know the guys from New York System, I know the guys from Recycle a Bike, I see people around and try to be friendly and not closed off. It is a tenuous relationship in some ways, but I don’t think it is also. I just want to be very aware of my place in the community, and not be closed off.
http://www.alisonnitkiewicz.com/
EP Can you give me a little background about how you got into the palace?
AN I have been living here for almost exactly three years now. I moved in right after I graduated from RISD. I love living here, it’s amazing. I had applied before but we have a no student policy. I didn’t know that, but I applied and now I've lived here ever since.
EP Can you touch on how living in Dirt Palace allows you to create a public space, or do you feel like it’s a more private, communal collective?
AN Ya I mean in some ways it’s like a very public space, and in other ways it’s like a fortress. When you’re not living here, it can feel unapproachable. But I think that also has to do with the people living here. I feel like we’re becoming more public because we just got our certificate of occupancy last year. So for a long time security was a concern with making sure the police or the fire department didn’t find out that people were actually living here. So I feel like since that we’ve become a lot more able to publicly say that we’re having an event. We don’t have to be as covert about things. Me and Daniela, who lives here, are starting a project called WDPRI. She fixed the speaker out front, so we’re doing a projection and having a show on Thursday, where she’s doing an album release and I’m doing a film screening and we’re having some other people. We’re going to broadcast it over the square, like live broadcast it. Which is kind of crazy.
EP So do you think that will bring people in?
AN Maybe, I don’t know. It’s a super public area. I walk out my front door and I’m in outside. I don’t know, it’s cool to have…that idea, I think we want to do eventually over the summer do radio shows where we just play into the square. It was kind of triggered by this place Cricket wireless, and the non-stop music they play all day, like some really good music and some horrible music, anything they want. And we’re like, why can’t we do that? And so that’s going to be a public thing.
EP Do you think that will speak to the window display?
AN Maybe, I think that’s an eventual idea, we want to be able to do sound stuff with the window display, and that is being renovated this week or next week.
EP So you’ve lived in Providence for 7 years. What’s your conceptualization of this space in Olneyville? Or how the neighborhood and Dirt Palace are in communication, or aren’t?
AN Well before I even lived in the dirt palace I was involved in various spaces that are in the area, like when building 13 was a space I had a space in there when I was twenty or something. So I’ve been in Olneyville for awhile, and I think that in some ways artists moving into a neighborhood is often the first wave of gentrification, and we’ve been here for like fifteen years and it’s crazy to see just in the time that I’ve been in Olneyville, how much there has been like this revitalized nightlife…in some ways I want to be critical of my place here because I am an artist who is educated, white, and I decided to move into an area that is majority immigrants and people who are not college educated white people. But I feel like it’s important in the Dirt Palace to be friendly to our neighbors. I know the guys from New York System, I know the guys from Recycle a Bike, I see people around and try to be friendly and not closed off. It is a tenuous relationship in some ways, but I don’t think it is also. I just want to be very aware of my place in the community, and not be closed off.
Pippi Zornoza/ on longevity, feminists, and incubators.
http://www.pippizornoza.com/
EP Can you speak to the physical location that Dirt Palace holds in Olneyville or in the community and how you as artists interact with that?
PZ Ya I probably have a different perspective than other people since I’ve been here for 15 years…16 years, I’ve lived in the neighborhood since before I joined dirt palace too, so to me, because I’m so rooted here, it very much feels like my home, and I don’t feel like an outsider. Although I didn’t grow up in Providence, I have lived in Providence for twenty years now, so more than half my life. It’s interesting because it’s actually something that Xander and I talk a lot about because there’s always been, each artist that’s here is so different. And each artist has very different ideas about how they want to interact with the arts community, the neighborhood, politically. So I feel like it’s very different for every single person, and there have been some people that have been super involved in neighborhood politics, and there’s also been people who, it’s totally not their interest. I think for us it’s really important, but it’s also been hard because the nature of the project is trying to really support all these really different individuals that are coming from all these different backgrounds. We don’t really have a formalized system and we have all these relationships in the neighborhood from being here for so long, and also being politically active. I think it’s something that in a way, it’s not like we want to formalize it, but figure out a way that we can be assets for people to plug in a little bit better. And outside of community meetings, just how can people plug in? So it’s something that I feel like we talk about quite a lot, but haven’t had an easy idea, specifically about the neighborhood. I mean I’m thinking more about the neighborhood, because I feel like as part of Providence, I actually think that within the arts community, things were very different when we first started.
EP How so?
PZ Well, for example, when we first started we did do events here, and they were mostly music, and our policy was that there had to be one woman on the entire bill. And we received a lot of push back from that as if that was a really difficult rigorous requirement. I also think that things were very much dominated by men. Obviously I think there’s been a lot of factors in how things have changed, but I do feel like we changed things here. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but I just feel like being stable and here and committed, and the fact that each person, you know there’s seven at time, stays here for two to three years, it’s been almost 50 women artists over 15 years. And they’ve all gone on. I feel like it’s an incubator space in a way. People come here, they get certain things done and then they go on and make their own things. I think we still fill a niche but there’s so many other things going on now, there’s just a lot more. I mean the city’s also grown people wise but I do feel like in some ways I feel like there are so many amazing women in the city doing radical things. And it feels really good. Obviously there are still all sorts of cultural systemic oppression. But feeling the difference of what’s actually happening here does is pretty awesome.
EP You talk about the push back with having just one woman on the bill? Can you elaborate on having a space that is so intensely feminist? Do you feel there is a support to that feminist mentality in the neighborhood? Or ambivalence to it?
PZ I would say ambivalence. But also I think we’re in a very different position than we were. We’ve only been legal for a year. So even though there are people who have been here that have been really engaged in different aspects, there’s a lot of hiding that we kind of had to do. And I think that it’s only now that were really coming to grips with how things can be different. Really recently, like in the last month, Xander made these blinds that are going in the front window, in between the installations down there, and they give information about what we are. And it says that we’re feminist on there. And it’s funny because there’s been nothing on the outside of the building saying who we are. You know? And it is a living space, so there is a certain amount of privacy. So I feel like were just sort of coming to grips with how we can be that way. And I know that in certain contexts I feel like there have been, and this is less in the neighborhood and more art world things, or political contacts, there have been times where it felt like people didn’t understand what we were really doing. And it kind of became this joke where we were like, do we have to call ourselves a feminist separatist commune? For people to understand. Which is not really what we are, but it’s almost having to use this extreme language or otherwise people don’t understand what we’re doing.
But it’s interesting, because there was maybe in earlier days more women here who didn’t identify as feminists. So it was very much about just supporting each other. And we did have conversations about why to use that word or not. And I mean definitely feminism as a history has such ups and downs and, you know, conflicts that are very valid, even from that history, but more people that didn’t identify as feminists at all. But they wanted to be here to do their work and they were interested in the project. Now there’s so many. I don’t know if it’s just younger people are more interested in feminism than people of my generation, even though I don’t feel that disparate, but I don’t if it was the times, or if it was just an upswing, or if now that we’ve been here we’re attracting very specific people who are not just looking for artist space, but are actually very specifically drawn to the project.
http://www.pippizornoza.com/
EP Can you speak to the physical location that Dirt Palace holds in Olneyville or in the community and how you as artists interact with that?
PZ Ya I probably have a different perspective than other people since I’ve been here for 15 years…16 years, I’ve lived in the neighborhood since before I joined dirt palace too, so to me, because I’m so rooted here, it very much feels like my home, and I don’t feel like an outsider. Although I didn’t grow up in Providence, I have lived in Providence for twenty years now, so more than half my life. It’s interesting because it’s actually something that Xander and I talk a lot about because there’s always been, each artist that’s here is so different. And each artist has very different ideas about how they want to interact with the arts community, the neighborhood, politically. So I feel like it’s very different for every single person, and there have been some people that have been super involved in neighborhood politics, and there’s also been people who, it’s totally not their interest. I think for us it’s really important, but it’s also been hard because the nature of the project is trying to really support all these really different individuals that are coming from all these different backgrounds. We don’t really have a formalized system and we have all these relationships in the neighborhood from being here for so long, and also being politically active. I think it’s something that in a way, it’s not like we want to formalize it, but figure out a way that we can be assets for people to plug in a little bit better. And outside of community meetings, just how can people plug in? So it’s something that I feel like we talk about quite a lot, but haven’t had an easy idea, specifically about the neighborhood. I mean I’m thinking more about the neighborhood, because I feel like as part of Providence, I actually think that within the arts community, things were very different when we first started.
EP How so?
PZ Well, for example, when we first started we did do events here, and they were mostly music, and our policy was that there had to be one woman on the entire bill. And we received a lot of push back from that as if that was a really difficult rigorous requirement. I also think that things were very much dominated by men. Obviously I think there’s been a lot of factors in how things have changed, but I do feel like we changed things here. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but I just feel like being stable and here and committed, and the fact that each person, you know there’s seven at time, stays here for two to three years, it’s been almost 50 women artists over 15 years. And they’ve all gone on. I feel like it’s an incubator space in a way. People come here, they get certain things done and then they go on and make their own things. I think we still fill a niche but there’s so many other things going on now, there’s just a lot more. I mean the city’s also grown people wise but I do feel like in some ways I feel like there are so many amazing women in the city doing radical things. And it feels really good. Obviously there are still all sorts of cultural systemic oppression. But feeling the difference of what’s actually happening here does is pretty awesome.
EP You talk about the push back with having just one woman on the bill? Can you elaborate on having a space that is so intensely feminist? Do you feel there is a support to that feminist mentality in the neighborhood? Or ambivalence to it?
PZ I would say ambivalence. But also I think we’re in a very different position than we were. We’ve only been legal for a year. So even though there are people who have been here that have been really engaged in different aspects, there’s a lot of hiding that we kind of had to do. And I think that it’s only now that were really coming to grips with how things can be different. Really recently, like in the last month, Xander made these blinds that are going in the front window, in between the installations down there, and they give information about what we are. And it says that we’re feminist on there. And it’s funny because there’s been nothing on the outside of the building saying who we are. You know? And it is a living space, so there is a certain amount of privacy. So I feel like were just sort of coming to grips with how we can be that way. And I know that in certain contexts I feel like there have been, and this is less in the neighborhood and more art world things, or political contacts, there have been times where it felt like people didn’t understand what we were really doing. And it kind of became this joke where we were like, do we have to call ourselves a feminist separatist commune? For people to understand. Which is not really what we are, but it’s almost having to use this extreme language or otherwise people don’t understand what we’re doing.
But it’s interesting, because there was maybe in earlier days more women here who didn’t identify as feminists. So it was very much about just supporting each other. And we did have conversations about why to use that word or not. And I mean definitely feminism as a history has such ups and downs and, you know, conflicts that are very valid, even from that history, but more people that didn’t identify as feminists at all. But they wanted to be here to do their work and they were interested in the project. Now there’s so many. I don’t know if it’s just younger people are more interested in feminism than people of my generation, even though I don’t feel that disparate, but I don’t if it was the times, or if it was just an upswing, or if now that we’ve been here we’re attracting very specific people who are not just looking for artist space, but are actually very specifically drawn to the project.
Daniela Ben-Bassat/ on being indignant, political, and technical.
http://www.dbenbassat.com/
EP Can you talk about the act of living at Dirt Palace? How you imagine it as a feminist collective? How it supports your art and speaks to your time in the city of Providence?
DBB I came to Providence because I went to RISD, and I think during my time there I was really secluded. I had heard of the dirt palace but it didn’t seem like anything I would ever be apart of, you’re just in such a bubble when you're in school, but then I moved out of Rhode Island, I lived in New York for a couple of years. Then I was thinking more about feminism and just trying to figure out what kinds of jobs I liked and work I wanted to make. And when I moved back here I became more aware of the dirt palace because of a lot of their facilities, and felt like I was more politically conscious after I wasn’t on the east side anymore.
EP Can you expand on becoming politically conscious as it’s related to feminism and dirt palace?
DBB Ya, I think I started thinking more about feminism in school because I was doing a lot of work with electronics, and just thinking about gender dynamics in my painting department, just becoming more and more indignant. And then when I lived in New York, I was doing more installation type of work and I was working in a wood shop for a while and it was just really hard to a. find jobs like that and b. deal with certain dynamics. But I think that was a gateway into thinking about other politics.
EP Do you feel like Dirt Palace is a politically charged space?
DBB Ya, I mean I think it’s pretty inherently politically charged just based on what it is. I think in my day to day I’ve gotten so used to it that it doesn’t seem totally political. But the fact that it makes things easier and more feasible than they would be…
EP Can you talk about the support network that exists here in terms of an individual artists' practice within the frame of communal living?
DBB I mean I think it’s both individual and supportive. We have meetings every week and rotate someone that’s going to talk about their work, I feel like our talk usually goes into other conceptual realms just based on technique. It’s cool to have a network of women who are technically minded or have access to all of this kinds of knowledge that isn’t traditional.
EP Do you feel like living in Dirt Palace gives you access to Olneyville, or that it’s secluded?
DBB It’s hard to know. I feel like I always came to this neighborhood for shows or to hang out with other people, so I don’t know if it’s changed the way I think about Olneyville necessarily. But it has changed the way I think about development and it’s made me think more about what it means to be a white artist living in a possibly gentrifying neighborhood?
EP Can you speak a little bit more about the idea of development as it relates to an artist’s collective occupying this space?
DBB Ya, I mean it’s hard. We were just talking about how everyone knows artists are the first wave of gentrifiers. I think knowing that you have to be more active in the role you play in your community.
EP So do you feel like that consciousness of the potential to be a gentrifying force makes you resist it?
DBB I think so. I know people who have lived here the longest are the most active in neighborhood associations and boards, and kind of playing different roles in the community.
EP Since it has been here for 15 years, do you feel like that at all makes it more a part of the neighborhood and less an outsider, or do you still have to work?
DBB Ya I definitely think we still have to work because we are mostly privileged, white people and I think that’s always a responsibility. But do I think that because it’s mean here for so long, maybe it’s not as bad. Because the wave that’s here now seems more corrupt to me, and I know that Pippi and Xander aren’t big time real estate moguls.
http://www.dbenbassat.com/
EP Can you talk about the act of living at Dirt Palace? How you imagine it as a feminist collective? How it supports your art and speaks to your time in the city of Providence?
DBB I came to Providence because I went to RISD, and I think during my time there I was really secluded. I had heard of the dirt palace but it didn’t seem like anything I would ever be apart of, you’re just in such a bubble when you're in school, but then I moved out of Rhode Island, I lived in New York for a couple of years. Then I was thinking more about feminism and just trying to figure out what kinds of jobs I liked and work I wanted to make. And when I moved back here I became more aware of the dirt palace because of a lot of their facilities, and felt like I was more politically conscious after I wasn’t on the east side anymore.
EP Can you expand on becoming politically conscious as it’s related to feminism and dirt palace?
DBB Ya, I think I started thinking more about feminism in school because I was doing a lot of work with electronics, and just thinking about gender dynamics in my painting department, just becoming more and more indignant. And then when I lived in New York, I was doing more installation type of work and I was working in a wood shop for a while and it was just really hard to a. find jobs like that and b. deal with certain dynamics. But I think that was a gateway into thinking about other politics.
EP Do you feel like Dirt Palace is a politically charged space?
DBB Ya, I mean I think it’s pretty inherently politically charged just based on what it is. I think in my day to day I’ve gotten so used to it that it doesn’t seem totally political. But the fact that it makes things easier and more feasible than they would be…
EP Can you talk about the support network that exists here in terms of an individual artists' practice within the frame of communal living?
DBB I mean I think it’s both individual and supportive. We have meetings every week and rotate someone that’s going to talk about their work, I feel like our talk usually goes into other conceptual realms just based on technique. It’s cool to have a network of women who are technically minded or have access to all of this kinds of knowledge that isn’t traditional.
EP Do you feel like living in Dirt Palace gives you access to Olneyville, or that it’s secluded?
DBB It’s hard to know. I feel like I always came to this neighborhood for shows or to hang out with other people, so I don’t know if it’s changed the way I think about Olneyville necessarily. But it has changed the way I think about development and it’s made me think more about what it means to be a white artist living in a possibly gentrifying neighborhood?
EP Can you speak a little bit more about the idea of development as it relates to an artist’s collective occupying this space?
DBB Ya, I mean it’s hard. We were just talking about how everyone knows artists are the first wave of gentrifiers. I think knowing that you have to be more active in the role you play in your community.
EP So do you feel like that consciousness of the potential to be a gentrifying force makes you resist it?
DBB I think so. I know people who have lived here the longest are the most active in neighborhood associations and boards, and kind of playing different roles in the community.
EP Since it has been here for 15 years, do you feel like that at all makes it more a part of the neighborhood and less an outsider, or do you still have to work?
DBB Ya I definitely think we still have to work because we are mostly privileged, white people and I think that’s always a responsibility. But do I think that because it’s mean here for so long, maybe it’s not as bad. Because the wave that’s here now seems more corrupt to me, and I know that Pippi and Xander aren’t big time real estate moguls.
InConclusion
While these interviews began as audio stories, I felt it was necessary to transcribe them in the interest of preserving an oral history with greater efficacy. Now that these perceptions and perspectives are visually accessible, it will be possible to easily reference the context that each woman provided, rather than placing the onus on the listener to dig through cumbersome recordings, the words are present on the page for cross reference at any time.
Some urban theory can augment the significance of Dirt Palace as a project, it should not overwrite the salient commentary provided within the bodies of the interviews themselves. As I've unraveled the pithy reflections, I am incapable of creating any decisive conclusion of brevity, or even continuity. Perhaps it is possible to think of Dirt Palace itself, not only its window display, as a public art piece. If we subscribe to a base understanding of Sharp's, Just Art for a Just City, then it is possible to see the efforts made at Dirt Palace, to aestheticize, to shrink the sidewalk schism severing public from private by projecting a montage of visual and audio stimulation into the square, as a very vivid enactment of a public art piece. "Thus, public art is art which has as its goal a desire to engage with its audiences and to create spaces -whether material, virtual or imagined - within which people can identify themselves, perhaps by creating a renewed reflection on community, on the uses of public spaces or on our behaviour within them. Public art, then, does not have only to be expressed visually. It can be expressed in terms of soundscapes...as well as in material spaces of inhabited landscapes" [3]. The manner in which Dirt Palace manifests as a framework for its discreet audience, casual pedestrians, and its carefully curated audience, the house residents, to create a reflexive and conscious community pursuant of an aesthetic enhancement and identity formation, is an iteration of just art.
This idea that Dirt Palace may be a manifestation of just art itself must be juxtaposed with the leeriness that some expressed about their very presence catalyzing gentrification. However, the complexity and nuance of the palace is folded into the dichotomy this hesitancy about positionally presents. While artists may be identifiable touchstones of imminent gentrification, the stability of the Palace itself, and its rooted establishment within the community presents an interesting case, begging the question of whether the artist must always be implicated in gentrification based on a superficial identity alone. Does a collective of artists who convened to purchase the building in order to resist being pushed out themselves then necessarily become a gentrifying force? In Smith's, Gentrification and Uneven Development, he articulates, " In fact, gentrification and urban redevelopment are the leading edge of a larger process of uneven development which is a specific process, rooted in the structure of the capitalist mode of production. According to this perspective, gentrification is only a small part of a restructuring urban space, which is, in turn, part of the wider economic restructuring necessitated by the present economic crisis" [4].
Here hangs the ambiguity. Dirt Palace, pursuant of a collective model that in many ways shirks the capitalist system within which it operates, and seeks to forge unique mechanisms of making meaning within the city space through art and a feminist politic, cannot be reductively dismissed as a gentrifier. That is a dismissal of its history, and a refusal to interact with the oppositional and symmetrical facets that paint the palace into the cityscape.
While these interviews began as audio stories, I felt it was necessary to transcribe them in the interest of preserving an oral history with greater efficacy. Now that these perceptions and perspectives are visually accessible, it will be possible to easily reference the context that each woman provided, rather than placing the onus on the listener to dig through cumbersome recordings, the words are present on the page for cross reference at any time.
Some urban theory can augment the significance of Dirt Palace as a project, it should not overwrite the salient commentary provided within the bodies of the interviews themselves. As I've unraveled the pithy reflections, I am incapable of creating any decisive conclusion of brevity, or even continuity. Perhaps it is possible to think of Dirt Palace itself, not only its window display, as a public art piece. If we subscribe to a base understanding of Sharp's, Just Art for a Just City, then it is possible to see the efforts made at Dirt Palace, to aestheticize, to shrink the sidewalk schism severing public from private by projecting a montage of visual and audio stimulation into the square, as a very vivid enactment of a public art piece. "Thus, public art is art which has as its goal a desire to engage with its audiences and to create spaces -whether material, virtual or imagined - within which people can identify themselves, perhaps by creating a renewed reflection on community, on the uses of public spaces or on our behaviour within them. Public art, then, does not have only to be expressed visually. It can be expressed in terms of soundscapes...as well as in material spaces of inhabited landscapes" [3]. The manner in which Dirt Palace manifests as a framework for its discreet audience, casual pedestrians, and its carefully curated audience, the house residents, to create a reflexive and conscious community pursuant of an aesthetic enhancement and identity formation, is an iteration of just art.
This idea that Dirt Palace may be a manifestation of just art itself must be juxtaposed with the leeriness that some expressed about their very presence catalyzing gentrification. However, the complexity and nuance of the palace is folded into the dichotomy this hesitancy about positionally presents. While artists may be identifiable touchstones of imminent gentrification, the stability of the Palace itself, and its rooted establishment within the community presents an interesting case, begging the question of whether the artist must always be implicated in gentrification based on a superficial identity alone. Does a collective of artists who convened to purchase the building in order to resist being pushed out themselves then necessarily become a gentrifying force? In Smith's, Gentrification and Uneven Development, he articulates, " In fact, gentrification and urban redevelopment are the leading edge of a larger process of uneven development which is a specific process, rooted in the structure of the capitalist mode of production. According to this perspective, gentrification is only a small part of a restructuring urban space, which is, in turn, part of the wider economic restructuring necessitated by the present economic crisis" [4].
Here hangs the ambiguity. Dirt Palace, pursuant of a collective model that in many ways shirks the capitalist system within which it operates, and seeks to forge unique mechanisms of making meaning within the city space through art and a feminist politic, cannot be reductively dismissed as a gentrifier. That is a dismissal of its history, and a refusal to interact with the oppositional and symmetrical facets that paint the palace into the cityscape.
References
1. Right to the City. Henri Lefebvre. Le Droit a la ville. 1968. pp. 1-7
2. Of Other Spaces. Michel Foucault; Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1. (Spring, 1986), pp. 22-27.
3. Sharp, Joanne, Venda Pollock, and Ronan Paddison. "Just Art for a Just City: Public Art and Social Inclusion in Urban Regeneration." CURS Urban Stud. Urban Studies 42, no. 5 (2005): 1001-023.
4. Smith, Neil. "Gentrification and Uneven Development." Economic Geography 58, no. 2 (1982): 139.
Thank you to Stefano Bloch for encouraging me to, "Let the ethnographic work do more of the talking than any claims that cannot be easily supported by the people in Dirt Palace's reality."
This was the advise that served as the crux of my project.