Blocking Objects
2023-ongoing
As part of Oakland’s ongoing efforts to commodify and gentrify neighborhoods, the city “cleans” or sweeps streets, displacing unhoused communities living legally within city limits in campers or tents. In the aftermath of these sweeps, people’s belongings are dumped in large mounds on empty lots, while barriers—cement blocks, triangular forms, and cut sections of tree trunks—are placed along sidewalks and road edges to prevent return. I began documenting these objects as they appeared along the streets of my neighborhood in Oakland and San Francisco.
This series understands these forms as part of a material language through which the city organizes exclusion and abandonment. By photographing them, the work asks how urban space is structured through deterrence and control. What seems ordinary becomes legible as evidence of displacement, rendering tangible the quiet infrastructures through which certain bodies are denied place.
