Sifting the Inner Belt

To sift: To make a close examination of all the parts of something in order to find something or to separate what is useful from what is not

Sifting the Inner Belt was a year-long public art project that consisted of a series of performance interventions and performance-based research projects, which closely observed and examined, i.e. sift, the South End neighborhood with an emphasis on creating emotional, conceptual and physical bridges between the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) and the Berkeley Community Garden (BCG).

Conceived in the summer of 2004, Sifting the Inner Belt was developed as a collaboration of artists, activists and community residents. This project was based upon ideas of audience participation, communication, and political intention, and was constructed through a generative process involving dialogue and community engagement through specific efforts, including research and interactive performance art.

“Inner Belt” refers to the ill-conceived and never completed highway project from 1948-1971 that would have created an inner beltway highway around downtown Boston and between the South End and Lower Roxbury. In the process of the failed project, hundreds of homes were destroyed, many families displaced, and yet, because the project was stopped, over one hundred gardens have sprung up. The foundations of these homes, the spirit of these families, and the legacy of the impact remain today.

The paradigm of public art, as Lucy Lippard writes, is about “laying out the ingredients but still looking for the recipe.” Our hope was that the community members in and around the neighborhood would create a variety of recipes in order to find the ways to taste the real, rich, and rewarding flavors of the community itself. Our interventions mainly laid out the evidence and materials of our work for people in the neighborhood to weave into one thread.

The exhibition at the BCA (June 17 – July 31, 2005) was the culmination of the year effort and included site-specific installations, video projection, sound, photography, written documentation/books, and a display of final and in-progress research which were autonomous from, yet relevant to, the community-at-large and the time we live in.

To learn more about it, please visit the Sifting the Inner Belt blog.