Stories allow us to travel through time. Buildings contain traces of the past, present and future. Knowledge is situated temporally and geographically. These are the stakes claimed by artists Sadie Harmon and Lauren Marie Taylor in Conjuring Multiple Histories, their extensive research project presented as a merging of historical city tour and séance.
Choosing locations based on their spiritual, historical, and geometric significance, Harmon and Taylor follow a path of intuitive research to unearth hidden connections and illuminate obscured accounts that they present to us in physical and virtual space. Public record is juxtaposed with public memory to re-contextualize the historical figures, sites, and ideologies of Gold-Rush Era California. They present their findings as narrative tours of each site. Each tour is followed by a séance, a word the artists use for its dual meaning: “persons assembled for discussion” and “a meeting for the investigation or exhibition of spiritualistic phenomena.”
Tour Details
Join PLAySPACE for individual segments or the full day.
7:30 a.m. Mountain View Cemetery, Chapel of the Chimes, 5000 Piedmont Avenue, Oakland
10:00 a.m. Oakland Public Library, 125 14th Street, Oakland
11:45 a.m. Jack London Square, Heinhold’s First and Last Chance, 48 Webster Street, Oakland
2:20 p.m. Jack London Square, Oakland, Transit via ferry to the San Francisco Ferry Building
2:45 p.m. Portsmouth Square, Bridge to Chinese Culture Center, Corner of Washington and Kearny Streets, San Francisco
4:30 p.m. Mechanics Institute Library, 57 Post Street, San Francisco
6:20 p.m. Sutro Baths Ruins, Point Lobos, San Francisco
This project is part of Touring the Social Imaginary, a series of exhibitions and participatory, public programs across the Bay Area organized by PLAySPACE, that map the social imaginary using research-intensive processes to ask questions about places and the people that inhabit them.
Other Related Events
PLAySPACE, The Paulette Long and Shepard Pollack Art Community Experiment, is a graduate student-run exhibition program. It provides the resources for student curators to conceptualize and present programming that is especially appropriate for, and oriented towards, the academic community. This programming is presented in various venues and locations throughout the community.