“Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world.”1
Noticing “public domesticities” is a practice of documenting sidewalk paraphernalia. Sometimes there is a readily legible distinction between something that is in use and something that has been thrown out, discarded, or designated as garbage. Other times the delineation is less pronounced, or I should say, it is less visible to me. This assortment is a rumination on shopping carts, curbside mattresses, armchairs in unexpected locations, grills that are in use, stovetops that are fake, abandoned jewelry boxes, disconnected refrigerators, brooms and dustpans that —from my own limited vantage— I more typically associate with the interior of a private home than with the public street.
Biking through downtown one weekday in early March, I see a white canvas pop-up tent with metal legs parked outside Grand Central Market. Somebody is selling expensive handbags in the space between the street and the sidewalk cordoned off for cafe tables. Less than a block away, somebody is sitting on the curb with a backpack in their arms, clearly distressed.
The pop-up tent obstructs the bike path, reminiscent of the outdoor dining tents and temporary parklet structures that cropped up across New York, San Francisco, Philly, and other US cities in the early months of pandemic lockdown. The tent’s proximity to unhoused folks in crisis illustrates the dramatized wealth inequality identified by writer and critic Soleil Ho, who in 2020 wrote about the exclusion of unhoused folks from the public realm through increased municipal surveillance and police presence simultaneous with the construction of makeshift structures to accommodate restaurants’ paying customers.2 The concerted attempt to control and limit access to public places like parks, plazas, the street, and sidewalk remains a fundamental project of US settler colonial empire.
Isolating assorted “public domesticities” from their human interlopers and from context —aside from immediate physical context— frames a false ambiguity. Initially, I solely photographed curbside garbage. Over the past two and a half years, I notice blurred lines and inadvertent intrusion and trespass in this photography. I take care to never photograph if a person is present, in the midst of their domestic tasking. I try to only frame a shot around abandoned objects, objects that have been given up to the public realm, not people’s possessions. But in this city, voyeuristic images of isolated objects in the street always call to mind the realities of unhoused neighbors. Clothes strewn across the thickened concrete edge of a bridge, alongside a raised pedestrian walkway and busy thoroughfare into Chinatown packed with Dodgers traffic, indicate the presence of somebody nearby who has just done their laundry in the LA river. I imagine the pain and degradation of such an act, the lack of privacy, the lack of access to basic resources to meet basic needs.
I also think about Indian stepwells, the ubiquitous public bathhouses of the Song dynasty in China, and Turkish baths dating back to the Umayyad period. When I am not in direct conversation with unhoused neighbors, I’m bearing witness to traces of domestic activity that prompt me to reflect on ritualized social gathering around bathing, cleaning, and other reproductive labors like cooking and caretaking, both historic and contemporaneous, that occur in public places. Midway through editing this, I pause to go downstairs and switch my laundry over from the wash to hang dry, in the privacy of my own bedroom. Having in-unit laundry for the first time in years is not something I take for granted after schlepping back and forth to the laundromat using the milk crate strapped to the back of my bike. The level of remove between these experiences, and the precarity and suffering that is highly visible and ubiquitous across LA county in the years since I’ve moved back here, is vast.
I balk at my own act of bearing witness to the traces and associated objects of “public domesticity” whenever the objects turn out not to be abandoned garbage or items in use by street vendors regularly bringing their wares to the public sidewalk, but rather, items in use by people who lack access to shelter. I consider the perspective of friends who work more intimately with unhoused folks, providing a range of direct services that are more face-to-face than my work in affordable housing production and advocacy for legislation that would fund those services, and mentally recommit to getting involved with food distribution here in Los Angeles like I had been back in West Philly.
Some of the assorted items are highly specific, crutches or mirrors that have been abandoned. I wonder if anybody will sit on this pea-green beanbag overlooking the traffic circle at the base of the LA river bike path and Riverside drive, where the 5 and the 110 intersect at the base of Elysian park. The sofa oriented towards LA state historic park looks simultaneously like something abandoned, set out for pickup by trash collectors or random passersby, and like a thing currently in use, facing toward the mountains to the left and the city skyline on the right.
The wooden pallet crates crafted into a bench to mitigate the steeply sloping concrete walls of the LA river read, to me, as a more explicitly purposeful intervention. The pallet crate bench inventively implements detritus and cheap materials to make something highly functional and aesthetic. A four minute ride down the path, a grill sits atop several tarps in a storm drain, clearly in use by somebody who has set up camp in the drain’s flat bottom. The drain is cut into the sloped walls of the river, functional yet treacherous on a normal day, deadly on a rainy one.
I find old gym bags and disembodied pieces of toilet, children’s desks, mattresses, furniture with mildly cursed personality and distinctive upholstery. I’m entranced by the strange placement of sofas at bus stops, under cars, or —bafflingly— pressed up against the gates of private buildings. Car seats removed from vehicles and propped up on sidewalk corners exhibit exposed metal springs. Shopping carts litter the streets, bridges, alleyways, metro stations, and river bed.
My embodied association with shopping carts is primarily my own insistence on picking up a hand basket walking into Grocery Outlet or 99 Ranch, only to regret my decision midway through traversing the aisles, weighed down by cooking oils, heads of cabbage, and packages of frozen dumplings. Increasingly, I find that association overwritten by observations from the bike lane. I pass someone’s possessions loaded into a shopping cart sitting on the pedestrian walkway on Broadway, a thick quilted blanket spilling out over the side and under the wheels. I cross back over the river two bridges south, at Main St, where somebody has paused to look out over the river facing north, pushing a cart overflowing with their possessions.
J, a multi-hyphenate artist working in jewelry design and fabrication, painting, drawing, clothing design, and photography including portraiture, sends a photo from her lunch break at Regen Projects. J has worked as a set painter for years and describes this site as “a fairly successful art gallery in Hollywood… I was walking back and saw that perfect framing. It’s crazy. The street (McCadden) is full of houseless folks set up in tents and makeshift homes out of tarps and stuff… Just the perfect juxtaposition… Inside looking out.”
J’s framing, a portrait of distinctly US-sited inequality, makes me think of Robert Rosenberger’s 2017 Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless. Hostile architecture, including spikes and studs embedded into flat surfaces with the explicit purpose of making sitting or sleeping uncomfortable, demonstrates that the design of discrete physical objects is itself violent towards unhoused, poor, or disabled, young and elderly neighbors who inhabit the public realm.3 Guerrilla urbanism seeks to upend this type of exclusionary design by repurposing and redesigning these seemingly mundane objects in the urban environment. Unhoused folks are constantly reinventing and renegotiating, making public places work for them as our government and private sector repeatedly neglect to put adequate effort, time, energy, or funding towards affordable housing, holistic mental healthcare services, rehabilitation and job training facilities, food access, education, and healthcare.
The late Mike Davis’s City of Quartz includes “Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space,” which details “the destruction of public space” and “sadistic street environments.” I’m thinking about his life’s work as simultaneously a writer and documentarian, a voyeur and professor operating from a position of remove, and as an activist, embodied and participating on the front lines in fights against racial and socio-economic injustice in our city, when MT describes the recent history of the underside of a bridge in a nearby neighborhood.
Back in 2016, five years before I’d moved back to LA after a decade living away, they would regularly observe an artist’s chair-based art project, which was located further down on the riverbed from where there is now a regular encampment. MT tells me they would see “fishermen, people taking cute pictures” posing in the various chairs that this artist would place. “It seemed very public use,” MT tells me, “at the time, nobody was living here. I used to hang out under that bridge almost overnight, pre-pandemic, with friends.” Now, merely pausing under that bridge is intrusive, as it has transformed into somebody’s private home. When I’m surprised to imagine the bridge absent an encampment, MT says “it’s like walking through Skid Row now. It’s hard to imagine it was ever anything else.”
While evading cops in Hollywood one weekend during peaceful protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza —where an attempted extermination of Palestinian people is being funded in part by US citizen tax dollars, and US-made weapons are fueling much of Israel’s settler colonial land grab— I look at the long lines of bright orange plastic construction barricades arranged to facilitate police kettling. The barricades make me think of an image PF just sent me the prior week, Italian designer Ugo La Pietra’s “anti-terrorism barriers,” a “soggiorno urbano” which translates to “urban living room.” I imagine these “anti-terrorism barriers” implemented thusly through tactical urbanism, so that healers and medics could sit with wounded protestors, a place for slowing a person’s heart rate and getting away from the cops, not used as tools to facilitate brutality and arrests.
The humorous absurdity of proposing that police barricades be transformed into comfortable seating arrangements that resemble domestic living rooms carries sardonic levity and play that I am often struck by when documenting “public domesticities.” For how many days has this refrigerator been sitting, not plugged into anything at all. Who left this oddly shaped sofa here, upturned on its side, seemingly cradling a traffic cone. Why are there crutches in the middle of the street, it’s both amusing and ominous, what of the person who left them here. The dollhouses left on the side of the road are absurdist, uncanny. High camp.
The need to cushion, to upholster, to soften— to make the urban environment more yielding to our bodies, is fabricated. US cities are insistently paved over with asphalt and designs for vehicles and machines, not the contours of our animal bodies or those of the coyotes and mountain lions running through our streets as their living, verdant homes are destroyed by bulldozers and incessant building. These normalized practices of erasure —the violent occupation of indigenous land, murder of indigenous inhabitants, and refutation of indigenous practices— have convinced so many inhabitants of US cities that our domestic lives should be contained in private structures that isolate us from each other and from our immediate environments, resulting in discrete categories of “housed” and “unhoused” neighbors, reinforcing entrenched inequities that separate us from each other.
In an excerpt from her poem for Gaza, poet Lupita Limón Corrales writes,
In Los Angeles, I’ve seen bulldozers and fences terrorize the poor.
All across the earth, those who control the bulldozers and the fences
Hope to control the people and the land, too.But a mother in Gaza reminds us, even as the sky is forced to drop their bombs,
That there is no God but God.In this war against children,
Against workers who survived being children,
In this war against olive trees and bakeries, libraries and poetry,
In this war against the living…
Our disconnection from place is designed by the insidious illogic of settler colonial empire. The concept “tabula rasa,” or “blank slate,” is a false premise taught by design schools across the US that erasure —of a people, of a culture, of a way of life— creates an empty space for something new to be built. “Tabula rasa” is a concept used by settler colonial nations to justify the starvation and forced famine of millions of people, broadcast globally through social media and insurgent news networks, motivated by the extraction of resources, the acquisition of oil and “valuable” beachfront “real estate.”4 Every day I learn more from indigenous practices and relationship, both of the land on which I am currently situated, of places I’ve previously called home, and elsewhere in the US, to reconfigure my values away from the culture in which I’ve been raised, and towards deepened relationship and reacquaintance with the ongoing work of this land’s original stewards, practices that can lead us away from the insidiously normalized everyday violence of witnessing public domesticities as they are currently situated in our cities.
Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013. Print.
Soleil Ho. “SF restaurant’s $200-per-person dome is America’s problems in a plastic nutshell.” SF Chronicle, 12 August 2020. https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/The-200-per-person-fine-dining-dome-is-15475555.php
Robert Rosenberger. Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless. University of Minnesota Press, 15 December 2017. Print.
Patrick Wintour. “Jared Kushner says Gaza’s ‘waterfront property could be very valuable’: Donald Trump’s son-in-law says Israel should ‘move the people out’ to Negrev desert and ‘clean up’ Gaza.” The Guardian, 19 March 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/19/jared-kushner-gaza-waterfront-property-israel-negev
let’s do food distro!