Saratoga (Inflating Agitation), 2022

by Related Tactics (Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nathan Watson).

Photographed onsite at Montalvo Center for the Arts villa

The(Inflating Agitation) series, as part of our Memories Breathe and Every Monument Deflates body of work, features an inflatable/deflatable monument base temporarily installed in specific sites that speak to often invisible moments in local community histories, particularly those linked to labor & social justice movements. The surface design of the deflatable suggests a plinth marked by guerrilla graffiti during national protests, subsequently painted over in blocky institutional gray–an acknowledgement that even without a figure upon its platform, the object continues to serve as a site for public negotiation and intervention around collective memory, power, and knowledge building.

While hosting Thick Solidarity residency project at Montalvo Center for the Arts, Related Tactics (Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, Nate Watson) installed (Inflating Agitation) in James D Phelan’s old villa library and courtyard. Phelan, former SF mayor and California Senator, was one of the architects of the Chinese Exclusion Act, was virulently anti-Japanese in his policies, and actively campaigned on a white supremacist platform. Part of Related Tactics’s framework for these residency sessions was to contend with the ways racist histories are deeply embedded in the spaces and institutions we navigate as artists of color, including this estate-turned-art-center-and-residency. So we returned to the inflatable piece and the way it invokes struggles around the construction of community memory and power felt appropriate in our last few days of the residency project.