David de Rozas: MAYBE WE ARE ALL ABANDONED BUILDINGS, JUST WAITING TO BE PULLED

April 21 - June 11,2023

From Co-Opt Research and Projects: "Please join us for an opening reception and artist talk by filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist David de Rozas at CO-OPt Research + Projects on Friday, April 21 at 6pm. Even though downtown Los Angeles only represents 1% of the city’s land, the current ‘DTLA 2040’ proposed plan projects the building of an additional 70,000 housing units and a rezoning of the entire area. This economic ‘growth machine,’ urban boom, and the influx of wealthy new inhabitants have resulted in the racialized displacement of long-term, low- and deeply low-income residents and family businesses. The current transformations reproduce downtown Los Angeles’s historical sense of itself as a space of continual erasure that can always be re-marketed as a ‘renaissance.’ In a moment when California is on the verge of becoming the world’s fourth-largest economy, the creation of wealth also generates dispossession and poverty. As the ‘DTLA 2040’ plan aims to complete a new spatial re-writing of the city, downtown Los Angeles functions as a locus, but simultaneously as a lacuna; a narrative where the erasure of memory and history is materialized as a place structured around past-present absences, hidden experiences, and repressed bodies. Yet, even as downtown leaps toward its future, it cannot escape a constellation of radical connections and disconnections, frictions between history and memory, selective conservations and disappearances, and negotiations of class, race, and gender that are currently enacting themselves on its narrative structures. The works that comprise MAYBE WE ARE ALL ABANDONED BUILDINGS, JUST WAITING TO BE PULLED seek to critically articulate these dissonances and multiple layers of reality by speculating with archival materials as potential tools to unflatten and mobilize downtown Los Angeles’ haunting urban environment and the traces of its historical erasures."

Reception: April 21, 2023 | 11-1 am

Film: June 03, 2023 | 7-8 pm
Moving or Being Moved: Films by Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown Saturday June 3, 2023 Doors 7pm / Screening 8pm

CO-OPt Research + Projects 4204 Boston Ave
Lubbock, Texas 79413
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