The City Against Itself

2014

The City Against Itself inspects the contradictions of the City of San Diego: a city self-marketed as a paradisiacal escape, a heaven-on-earth home to numerous religious and scientific organizations claiming a direct connection to the heavens (from Palomar Observatory to SPAWAR to Heaven's Gate to Unarius Academy of Science). The City Against Itself forms a particular condensation of the City of San Diego, whose early 20th century builders and boosters effectively attracted the multitude of migrant hopefuls across the continent to their desert land of plenty providing the newcomer with an eden embroiled in conflicts with labor, poverty, and, as noted by Edmund Wilson in ‘The Jumping Off Place', a conspicuous nation leading suicide rate. Responding in part to the widely dispersed image of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s California Building, centerpiece of the Panama California Exposition — past and present sell-point for the city and icon of both aspirant longing and chimerical elsewhere — The City Against Itself looks at the privileging of fantastically non-urban space in the development of the city and seeks to question what can be learned from San Diego and the politics of its settler colonial ideology of escape; moving from the terrestrial to the extraterrestrial.

The City Against Itself, single channel video, 00:12:42, 2014.