Privacies Infrastructure

Fences, window gratings, and security gates are common fixtures of East Los Angeles's residential landscape. They are contradictory objects that can divide, define, conceal, and control access. They are so ubiquitous in the Los Angeles urban fabric that they often go unnoticed, yet they are integral to the ways we define individual and collective access to land, housing, and property. These unnamed, un-authored objects of the built environment are the instruments by which Los Angeles property owners negotiate their own privacy and private space in a densifying neighborhood, while demonstrating the charged notion privatization can take within the city. What is the visual culture of privacy and private acts? What are the architectural and spatial devices by which we privatize space? How do we draw and materialize the boundary between others and ourselves in ways that are both discreet and ubiquitous? Privacies Infrastructure explores the physical, social, and embodied structures of privacy and privatization in the residential landscape of East Los Angeles by inviting four artists and designers: Besler & Sons, Tanya Brodsky, Fiona Connor, and Gwyneth Shanks, to observe, respond, and activate through public installation, performance, publication, and programming. This project is organized by guest curator Aurora Tang and M&A director Jia Gu.