Privacies Infrastructure

Why do our neighborhoods look the way they do? Through temporary installations, workshops, performances and public programming, Privacies Infrastructure investigates the physical culture of privacy and privatization through the language of fences, hedges, window gratings and security gates.

Privacies Infrastructure is a new public program by Materials & Applications that explores the notions of privacy and privatization in the residential landscape of Los Angeles. A walk through our neighborhoods reveals a visual catalogue of wood planks, chain link fencing, steel bars, aluminum screens, and green hedges. These fences, window gratings, and security gates are common fixtures of many residential Los Angeles neighborhoods. They are so ubiquitous in the city’s 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.

Typically sited on the actual property line that separates private space from public space, gates and grates define the line we draw between ourselves and others, separating us from neighbors and strangers. These security fixtures also become the material manifestation of the invisible systems that govern our neighborhoods, such as the city’s building codes, zoning policies, or property laws delegating ownership and access. These seemingly unnamed, un-authored objects of the built environment are the instruments by which Los Angeles residents negotiate their own privacy and private space, 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 asks artists and architects to interrogate the physical structures of privacy and privatization in Los Angeles through temporary projects in Council District 13. After a year of negotiations between M&A and multiple property owners and public entities for access to project sites, the resulting program demonstrates the difficulties of both gaining access to land and blurring the boundary between private space and public use. The multifaceted program unfolds over the summer with outdoor installations, performance, and public programming, including four new commissions by Besler & Sons, Tanya Brodsky, Fiona Connor, Gwyneth Shanks and Sarah Lewis-Cappellari, amongst others. Privacies Infrastructure is organized by guest curator Aurora Tang with Materials & Applications director Jia Gu.