["New York Close Up"]
--Excuse me!
[Abigail DeVille, artist]
It's fun to be in the street, pushing something,
and making people to get out of your way.
[LAUGHS]
I think pushing things in carts is just city living.
Like, there's no car culture here in New York.
And I think it's already inherently understood:
She's working, slash, she's an artist.
"What are y'all doing?"
"Oh, you're doing an art documentary?"
"Good luck to you."
["Abigail DeVille's Harlem Stories"]
I'm interested in telling invisible histories
about groups of people that occupied a space that no longer exist.
Like, the 400-year-old history here in Harlem
is just the natives being displaced up to this very moment.
But, they helped shape the place into what it is now.
Nobody would know that 123 West 131st Street was a boarding house
that my grandfather was born and raised in.
And now it's the ugliest building on the block.
This salmon-colored thing that was selling for five hundred thousand dollars
for one apartment in the building.
Give me a break.
I'm not 100% sure on background information on my grandfather
and I don't know how much clarity he had himself.
I know that he was raised by an elder couple
and their names were Maudey and Count DeVille.
So, you know, good luck finding that on ancestry.com.
I think, maybe,
that's what placing those heads in the street was about,
kind of a reclaiming of a space or of a territory.
My grandmother lived across the street,
and so that's how she met my grandfather
and made my Daddy.
So, I just chose the space that could have potentially been
the brownstone that she lived in.
My grandmother's family came from Richmond, Virginia in the Thirties and Forties.
So, they were part of the Great Migration,
which is the wave of six million African Americans
moving from the south to Northern cities and West, looking for better opportunities.
And, here we are, a hundred years later...
And now, there's holes all over Harlem.
Like, building sites of new things.
It sort of feels like the earth is shifting and moving,
and things are being raised and leveled, and new things are being built
and old things are being done away with.
New groups of people are moving in
and old groups of people are being pushed out.
So, it's almost like migratory patterns of birds or something.
You're witnessing history.
There is an African burial ground
somewhere near 126th Street and the base of the Willis Avenue bridge.
It seems to be some strange staging ground
for emergency vehicles and police presence, continuously.
It's just an odd in-between place that hasn't found meaning yet,
that they haven't been able to turn into something depressing,
like a Whole Foods
or a condo.
[LAUGHS]
A condo sliver.
I've been thinking about that site for a long time.
So, this is my first pass at it.
It's just an exercise of acknowledgement.
All I kept thinking about was these bodies, with no names and no faces.
That these bodies that weren't cared about while they were here,
And still aren't cared about.
I was trying to invoke a human kind of presence.
I think of trash as a record of existence--
that these things were used by people.
They're the archeological evidence of the present moment.
History is permeating everything, whether you know it or not.
I think trash is the absolute perfect response for talking about that space
because that's how those people were treated.
That's how that site is being treated.
--Lemme see that.
--Yo guys!
--They say this is art!
I think it's important to acknowledge the people that went behind you,
even if they lived the most mundane life.
Decisions they made are the reason why you exist.
Because my grandmother thought my grand dad was cute
she got knocked up with my Dad, you know?
Like, she didn't have to think the dude across the street was cute with his straight hair.
You know, I wouldn't be here.
I don't think things are just...
...random.
They're not.