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Narrow: RUINATION OR RENOVATION?

The juxtaposed images don't immediately render themselves legible as "toxic" or "ruined," but I think this is part of the point. The accompanying text give the deeper history behind the two images and what the renovated Union Station has replaced. The clean architectural lines and bright colors of the new building hide the more sordid history of displacment and disposession behind the urban renewal project. These juxtaposed images thus ask the view to question what kinds of political and social maneuvers needed to happen Chinatown to transition into a different kind of space. 

Narrow: Union Station/Old Chinatown

The juxtaposed images don't immediately render themselves legible as "toxic" or "ruined," but I think this is part of the point. The accompanying text give the deeper history behind the two images and what the renovated Union Station has replaced. The clean architectural lines and bright colors of the new building hide the more sordid history of displacment and disposession behind the urban renewal project. These juxtaposed images thus ask the view to question what kinds of political and social maneuvers needed to happen Chinatown to transition into a different kind of space. 

Narrow: Union Station/Old Chinatown

The juxtaposed images don't immediately render themselves legible as "toxic" or "ruined," but I think this is part of the point. The accompanying text give the deeper history behind the two images and what the renovated Union Station has replaced. The clean architectural lines and bright colors of the new building hide the more sordid history of displacment and disposession behind the urban renewal project. These juxtaposed images thus ask the view to question what kinds of political and social maneuvers needed to happen Chinatown to transition into a different kind of space. 

Genealogies

This image, and the others you have put together in this collapse-of-time model, bring me back to Foucault's dislike of the term "history". These images, by revealing what has been obfuscated by rigged narratives, and racist power pulpits, instead ethnographically point to the genealogical work of disarticulating particular archives, with their particular epistemological pedigrees.

Maka Suarez: Created Image: Union Station / Old Chinatown

There is a visually easy way of seeing regeneration "happen" through these images. Processes of exclusion, expulsion, and eviction are visualized through the juxtaposed construction. The way in which infrastructure allows for a restructuring of space is key in this image. The two arches (one in each picture) give me a sense of attempted continuity. The removal of any Chinese architectural legacy from the new station brutally deletes history.