SFWF | Mission

Mission Statement

Historically, world's fairs have celebrated progress through aestheticized feats of technology and industry. For example, the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 adopted the Panama Canal as its emblematic achievement. The San Francisco World's Fair of 2007 considered the opening of the city's new Third Street Light Rail system, a local but nevertheless problematic initiative to connect the residents of several disparate communities to San Francisco's larger urban network. Bayview-Hunters Point is the largest and most significantly affected community along the Third Street line; it once supported an active naval shipyard and encompasses a 2,500 resident housing project but has long been poorly served by the city and county officials whose predecessors helped create it. Third Street and Bayview-Hunters Point can be seen as San Francisco's "final frontier", a surprisingly beautiful but partly abandoned southern area of the city surrounded on its three other sides by water; an area whose post-industrial landscape of empty warehouses, decaying wharves and toxic former industrial sites is constantly under the watchful eyes of real estate developers. Adjacent to Bayview-Hunters Point is the nascent arts scene of the Dogpatch neighborhood, one of the harbingers of a pattern of gentrification replicated in "hip" neighborhoods across America, and two Light Rail stops closer to downtown is the brand new biotechnology-focused campus of the University of California, surrounded by vacant lots earmarked for upmarket housing developments.

In choosing the Third Street Light Rail as our emblem, we hoped to examine the ways in which contemporary ideas of urban progress are inextricably tied to the politics of isolation, colonization, and mobility. Connecting disparate sections of the city and making them easily traversable by public transport is certainly in some senses progressive, but we wanted to take this opportunity to ask ourselves whose interests are truly being served by the overall redevelopment process.

The world's fair was our structure and the Third Street Light Rail was our Panama Canal in a quest to create a dialog about the consequences of a linear trajectory set against the manifold possibilities of the roads not traveled.

The predictable future of Third Street shows that it is possible to conflate time; to see the past, present, and future existing simultaneously in one social field where power is unevenly distributed. In light of this, we invited artists, activists, and other practitioners as both individuals and community members to reflect on current and future needs and desires within this complex reality. How do we adapt to our surroundings, how do they adapt to us, and who conducts this exchange? We recognized that both the structure of our world's fair and our position as Curatorial Practice students at California College of the Arts - an institution whose San Francisco campus is only a few blocks away from the nearest Light Rail station and which is currently engaged in acquiring and developing real estate in the area - implicate us in the re-development of Third Street. Our questions were not rhetorical but rather, we would like to hope, a legitimate request for strategies that promote a creative and multifaceted engagement with the future possibilities inherent in a specific situation.

Curators

Mike Bianco
Erin Elder
Julia Hamilton
Grace Kook-Anderson
Cara Lewis
Shasha Liu
Allegra Madsen
Jessica Silverman
Zoe Taleporos
Kuniko Vroman
Nancy Zastudil
Will Bradley, Instructor