Pronouns: Human?
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Ben Airing
Research interests:
I take a historical-ethnographic approach to urban renewal, paying particular attention to its materiality. Conceptually, I approach the spectacle of renewal as a perpetual reiteration of settler-colonial futurity on land transformed into property (i.e., stolen), so I am drawn to the dialogue between different conceptions of the urban past and the different types of nostalgia that inflect them. For my current project situated in Lower Manahatta, I am interviewing elderly artists involved in the legalization of residential lofts in the 1960s and 70s. Working with their stories, homes, and personal archives, which are all consistently occluded from debates about urban life, I am interested to see what they say to the supposed inevitability of renewal (out with the old, in with the new) and to the supposed impossibility of reclaiming (or better, returning) a city run by an omnipotent real estate regime.
