Look Longer: Reflections on Opening Passages: Photographers Respond to Chicago and Paris

June 12, 2024

Art Design Chicago, Bilingual, Essays + Reviews

Ghosh and roach go on a journey across the city to a multi-venue and multi-neighborhood project Opening Passages that de-centers the Loop as the main hub for cultural creativity in Chicago.

Image: Installation view in a corner of the Chicago Cultural Center. On the left wall of the image are three of Marion Poussier’s photographs from On est là (2021), and the adjacent wall are four of zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal’s photographs of Lake Michigan, with four more mounted on platforms on the ground. Poussier’s photographs are three scenes from beside the Canal St. Denis, and dumas o’neal’s are close-ups of light hitting the lake in varying hues. Courtesy of Villa Albertine.

This article is presented in conjunction with Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art that seeks to expand narratives of American art with an emphasis on the city’s diverse and vibrant creative cultures and the stories they tell.

“A city is first people and other life forms inhabiting a space together,” says Opening Passages co-curator Pascal Beausse. Framing cities as a clustering of life forms brings up large questions about urban life: what does it mean to inhabit a big city while transforming it? What can we make of interdependency that inevitably emerges with the organization of life? How can we sensitively interact with each other and our surroundings? These questions, among others, are a starting point for the work in this trans-Atlantic group exhibition, a collaboration between Villa Albertine, Ateliers Médicis, and CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques).

Opening Passages: Photographers Respond to Chicago and Paris is an exhibition of five French and five American photographers across four Chicago venues. The American photographers who explore these questions are Marzena Abrahamik, Jonathan Castillo, zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal, Tonika Lewis Johnson, and Sasha Phyars-Burgess. The French artists include Gilberto Güiza-Rojas, Karim Kal, Assia Labbas, Marion Poussier, and Rebecca Topakian.

Transcription of audio interview with co-curator Pascal Beausse recorded by Jackson Roach: “Our cultures, our city likes to imagine that there’s center and a periphery. We need to rethink it. I mean, everywhere, it’s the center of the world. Everywhere, a very specific life form is trying to establish its life and to make connections with other lives and to live peacefully. It’s the center of the world.”

From a logistical standpoint, seeing this exhibition in its entirety requires traveling from one end of Chicago to another—in addition to the large Cultural Center exhibition, there are also works installed at 6018 North in Edgewater, BUILD Chicago in Austin, and Experimental Station in Woodlawn. A tenet of the exhibition is to challenge the notion of a cultural “center” in the city, made evident by the decision to make all four venues free and accessible to various neighborhoods on the outskirts of Chicago. It isn’t just in theory that we should de-center conventional spaces like large museums and galleries when exhibiting art, but in practice. As much as the Loop and its many beautiful art spaces are building blocks of Chicago’s cultural landscape, Villa Albertine and Atelier Médicis demonstrate that an experimental space in Woodlawn, a community nonprofit in Austin, or a renovated home/gallery space in Edgewater could (and should) be treated equally as artistic hearts of the city.

While the three satellite venues feature only some overlapping artists, certain themes about urban life echo throughout the ambitious exhibition, creating dialogue between two diverse, sprawling cities in Opening Passages. This piece is divided along three of those throughlines, and incorporates interview clips as well as other sonic elements embedded throughout incorporating French language.

* * *

Transit/Mouvement

Field recording by Jackson Roach: riding the Red Line from South to North Side of Chicago.

After attending a panel featuring Parisian photojournalist Assia Labbas and Chicago-based artists Tonika Lewis Johnson and zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal having illuminating conversations about movement and change through their respective cities, I hopped on the Red Line from Garfield Station to the end of the the north side for errands in Little India. I sat in the train for nearly forty minutes, as Labbas did on the RER-B, the Parisian train that runs the length of the city from north to south. In her installation RER B-ANLIEUS (on view at the Cultural Center as well as Experimental Station), Labbas presents the train line as an “axis that reflects the scale of the region’s socio-economic disparities.” The slideshow she creates using photographs taken in peripheral neighborhoods of Paris is mounted on the walls in retro Kodachrome slides as well as projected onto a screen accompanied by the voices of riders discussing their journeys.

Transcription of audio interview with artist Assia Labbas recorded by Jackson Roach: “So the train, you see the windows of the train, they look like the frame of a slide. Basically, the project is [exploring] when you take the train, you always see the same landscape, obviously, because it’s always taking the same road. And when you look at the television, you always see the same images about the suburbs and the type of population who live there. So I wanted to slow down. And that’s why in the documentary, pictures are going slowly and slowly. And also [adding] other images like the neighborhood or parks, just basic stuff that is not extraordinary, but just daily life. What I wanted to do is change the image that there is, to show something else, to show another image that we don’t see usually on television.”

Image: Installation view, RER B-ANLIEUS,2021. A man just finished adhering a poster of Assia Labbas’ RER B-ANLIEUS onto a brick wall along the outer perimeter of Experimental Station, Woodlawn. The piece looks like a strip of film for a Kodak carousel projector, with vignette-style photographs from different locations in Paris along the RER-B train line as the slides. Courtesy of Villa Albertine. — Image: Installation view, *RER B-ANLIEUS*,2021. A man just finished adhering a poster of Assia Labbas’ *RER B-ANLIEUS* onto a brick wall along the outer perimeter of Experimental Station, Woodlawn. The piece looks like a strip of film for a Kodak carousel projector, with vignette-style photographs from different locations in Paris along the RER-B train line as the slides. Courtesy of Villa Albertine.

Similarly, Karim Kal’s work is framed by a train line, but shifts the focus away from people and onto the infrastructure and built environment on the outskirts of the Parisian landscape. If Labbas’ gaze is out (through the train’s windows), Kal’s is in (through the brutal structures of the exurbs onto the dark voids they frame). He casts life with an uncanny atmosphere with his large-scale, enigmatic photographs of stations and their features, including security cameras and Parisian hostile architecture following the Ligne D. His photographs bring us into a sense of eerie, empty darkness not often associated with a bustling city. There is an opacity to the void-like darkness framed by train tunnels, platforms, or desire paths. The thread of a city is, to some extent, always hidden from us—everything conceals something else. He says, what interests him in his work is our “collective responsibility to create spaces for people to live.” With one series of five photographs in the Cultural Center exhibition, more of Kal’s work is also installed at BUILD Chicago, in Austin.

Transcription of audio interview with artist Karim Kal recorded by Jackson Roach: “I tried to produce something like a mysterious representation with a kind of poetry, but also a kind of inquiétude [discomfort]. I like the idea that I’m not showing everything, that it’s a kind of photography that doesn’t reveal, it’s a photography that make[s] a bit of darkness.”

Image: Installation view, Karim Kal, Ligne Dée (2017). Five large black-and-white photographs with images of and around stations on the outskirts of Paris. Above, one of Rebecca Topakian’s silk flags is hung from the ceiling. On the adjacent left wall is a glimpse of Gilberto Guïza-Rojas’ collages. Courtesy of Villa Albertine. — Image: Installation view, Karim Kal, *Ligne Dée* (2017). Five large black-and-white photographs with images of and around stations on the outskirts of Paris. Above, one of Rebecca Topakian’s silk flags is hung from the ceiling. On the adjacent left wall is a glimpse of Gilberto Güiza-Rojas’ collages. Courtesy of Villa Albertine.

Rebecca Topakian’s work encourages us to look up in the rush of the city. Her series, named (n=6-9) referencing the enzyme that gives the parakeets of Paris their particular bright color, is printed on silk flags and hung above the exhibition. These art pieces were produced during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and are fuzzy pictures of “invasive” Parisian parakeets printed onto silk flags and hung from the ceiling. It would be easy to miss her work if one doesn’t take the time to look above, and it takes a moment to discern what the pictures are of, given that the parakeets are blurred by motion. In the peculiar citywide stillness, she noticed a nesting colony of birds just down the block from her apartment and began to photograph them. The parakeets and other nonhuman ecology of the city continued onward, without regard for the borders and restrictions inherent to human uses of space. In such a fraught moment for humanity, Topakian’s turn to document the movements of other life forms, with whom we share space, shows how much the city is in motion, even if we are still.

Transcription of audio interview with artist Rebecca Topakian recorded by Jackson Roach: “Scientists who studied birds try to understand their perception of territory by putting on them a very human vision of territory. That is a vision where you have to fight or be in competition for your territory. And it’s not the same for birds. They’re very okay with respecting each other. So it’s a very different perception of territory compared to humans. Nature doesn’t really care about [possessiveness].This is ours. This is yours. They find a way to live together.”

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Travail/Work

Field recording by Jackson Roach: installation at the Chicago Cultural Center.

“One subject is shown to have previously been a journalist holding a microphone as if interviewing a ladder, now being trained as a construction worker. This transformation from someone whose work was once highly visible to one whose work falls into what Güiza-Rojas describes as “invisible” is particularly striking.”

Métro, boulot, dodo is a cheeky French idiom akin to ‘another day, another dollar,’ specific to the working-class Parisian experience. Translated, the rhythm of urban life is métro/subway, boulot/a job or a gig, dodo/baby-talk for going to sleep. The representation of work life or hustle in Paris is depicted in Gilberto Güiza-Rojas’s series Territoire-Travail/Territory-Work, which consists of five collages. Each features an image of migrants taking on new trades at Afpa, a vocational training center outside the city. Superimposed on these portraits is an image of the same subject performing gestures of the job they had before arriving in Paris and their need to take up a new trade, which is often an “invisible” profession.

Transcription of audio interview with artist Gilberto Güiza-Rojas recorded by Jackson Roach: “Et donc, par la suite, ça fait plus de dix ans que j’ai photographié les gens qui ont des métiers qui les rendent invisibles. Donc, qui sont des métiers plutôt manuels et souvent pas qualifiés et assez précarisés. Et donc, depuis le début, je me suis dit que je voulais construire des images avec les gens. [And so…for ten years, I have photographed people who have jobs that render them invisible, which are often manual labor and precarious jobs. So then, from the beginning, I told myself that I wanted to build images with human subjects.]”

Güiza-Rojas’ use of collage and staging innovatively layers the different professions of his subjects, and by extension, the different identities and lives they’ve held across their migratory trajectories. One subject is shown to have previously been a journalist holding a microphone as if interviewing a ladder, now being trained as a construction worker. This transformation from someone whose work was once highly visible to one whose work falls into what Güiza-Rojas describes as “invisible” is particularly striking. This series honors the individuality and the complexity of their journeys beyond their work which keeps the city functioning.

Image: Installation view of three of Güiza-Rojas’ pieces from Territoire-Travail (2018). From left to right, one is a picture of a man performing janitorial work inside a building with one hand and working on a laptop with the other; the second is a man in a construction hat at a construction site, staged to look like he is working on a red lamp as an electrician; the third is a man in a neon construction vest and hat holding a large microphone up to a ladder. Courtesy of Villa Albertine. — Image: Installation view of three of Güiza-Rojas’ pieces from *Territoire-Travail* (2018). From left to right, one is a picture of a man performing janitorial work inside a building with one hand and working on a laptop with the other; the second is a man in a construction hat at a construction site, staged to look like he is working on a red lamp as an electrician; the third is a man in a neon construction vest and hat holding a large microphone up to a ladder. Courtesy of Villa Albertine.

On the American side, Jonathan Castillo’s work also explores how migrant subjects make their way through work and environments in a new city, specifically photographing business owners throughout Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods. His portraits are set against intensely colorful backdrops of eclectic shops and restaurants that are typically crammed with culturally specific goods (Ukrainian and Polish flags in one; saris from Devon Ave in another; boxes of fortune cookies in the back of a restaurant). We can feel the earnestness with which these businesses are built, and see the tangible pieces of their own cultures that are manifested in their American entrepreneurial endeavors, much like how Territoire-Travail brings to the forefront the implications of work as a migrant in both cities.

Transcription of audio interview with artist Jonathan Castillo recorded by Jackson Roach: “When I started the project, I initially kind of thought that I was doing it because we’re going to be losing this. We’re going to lose all these small businesses. And I wanted to photograph them, but the more time I spent doing it, the more I realized that’s not the case. We’re not losing these small businesses. They just kind of go in cycles, you know? Like, you get people that open businesses because this is a way to have autonomy, care for your family, make your money, and often, if you can’t afford childcare and you can have the kid in the business, it’s a way to also kill two birds with one stone. And then those kids go up and go to college and then you suddenly [question] maybe you don’t need that store anymore, right? So that store closes down because mom and dad don’t need to do that anymore because they’ve raised their kids. So these things go in cycles. Sometimes the stores become so successful that they pass down to generations of the family, or they pass from one family to another. So the more I’ve done this, the less I’m lamenting the loss of something. It’s much more of a celebratory thing and an acknowledgment that these places can be very ephemeral individually, but collectively, they’re not going anywhere, I think.”

Castillo’s scenes of migration and work, along with those of Gilberto Güiza-Rojas, render rhythmic aspects of city life as a migrant worker (whether due to the nature of the labor or the position of the laborers in the city) hypervisible.

“Photographs ask a lot of questions if you do them well,” said Castillo. “When you look at a portrait, there’s more room for the viewer to see, say things like, well, I wonder what’s going on in this person’s head. What are they thinking? What is this person’s life like? I think when people ask questions about one another, that’s how people connect.” In their thoughtfully staged images of workers who may not often be considered for long enough to bring up these questions, Castillo and Güiza-Rojas invite us to slow down to witness the marginalized labor (and laborers) within the mechanisms of the city.

* * *

Change/Changement

Field recording by Jackson Roach: a flock of Chicago’s parakeets.

The urban legend backstory for Topakian’s work is that in the 1970s, a bus carrying parakeets being imported as exotic pets via Charles de Gaulle airport crashed, disastrously releasing a new species into the delicate Parisian avian ecosystem. Iterations of the same parakeet invasion occurred in global cities across Europe around the same time many people were importing animals as decorative household ornaments from tropical colonies.

“The urban legend backstory for Topakian’s work is that in the 1970s, a bus carrying parakeets being imported as exotic pets via Charles de Gaulle airport crashed, disastrously releasing a new species into the delicate Parisian avian ecosystem.”

Transcription of audio interview with artist Rebecca Topakian recorded by Jackson Roach: “What is interesting is that it’s a bird that comes, either from Africa or from Asia, so parts of the world that have been colonized by France. So you have different layers of reading this. In the sixties, or maybe fifties, it was very common to have this kind of exotic bird at your house [as] decoration. It was cool to have an exotic bird. They started to breed and now, there’s parakeets everywhere. I found it interesting that it’s this exotic animal, imported from areas of the world that had been colonized. And people used to really love [having] it in a cage. Of course, it’s more subtle than that, but symbolically that’s what you hear. It’s like people loved [them] in cages, but when it got freed, it’s like, oh, it’s invasive, it’s dangerous.”

Image: Installation view at 6018|North of two of Topakian’s silk flags hanging from the ceiling. In the foreground is a light-colored flag with trees in the corners and a couple of small birds in flight visible. The words c’est une famille plus à nourrir are printed in white in the top left corner. The second flag is partially covered behind the first. It is a picture of the dark sky with bright birds in flight, and the words mais qu’est-ce qu’invasif veut dire? in white text in the bottom right corner. They are hanging above an exhibition space that is a converted home, with two chairs and a long table. Courtesy of Villa Albertine. — Image: Installation view at 6018 | North of two of Topakian’s silk flags hanging from the ceiling. In the foreground is a light-colored flag with trees in the corners and a couple of small birds in flight visible. The words *c’est une famille plus à nourrir* are printed in white in the top left corner. The second flag is partially covered behind the first. It is a picture of the dark sky with bright birds in flight, and the words *mais qu’est-ce qu’invasif veut dire?* in white text in the bottom right corner. They are hanging above an exhibition space that is a converted home, with two chairs and a long table. Courtesy of Villa Albertine.

“At any given time, a city is moving towards a drastically different iteration of itself, as are its various life forms; Topakian’s birds are a reminder that whether a change is labeled and interpreted as harmful or beneficial, change is in the end simply a constant fact of urban life, and the decision is ours how we interact with it.”

Her pieces mais qu’est-ce qu’invasif veut dire? (meaning: but what does invasive mean?), c’est une famille plus à nourrir (that’s one more family to feed), and ils ne sont pas fautifs mais ce n’est pas leur milieu (it’s not their fault, but it’s not their environment), are a mixture of lines from comment sections both from articles about the “problem” of the “invasive” parakeets as well as about the influxes of migrants from many former colonies into Paris. Chicago is currently also in the process of integrating tens of thousands of migrants from South America and concurrently the geography of Paris is being rapidly reworked by the coming 2024 Summer Olympics, both cities are in moments of change that will mark significant changes in their ever-shifting landscapes.

At any given time, a city is moving towards a drastically different iteration of itself, as are its various life forms; Topakian’s birds are a reminder that whether a change is labeled and interpreted as harmful or beneficial, change is in the end simply a constant fact of urban life, and the decision is ours how we interact with it.

Transcription of audio interview with co-curator Pascal Beausse recorded by Jackson Roach: ”You can have [a] more interesting understanding of the world today, which is always in evolution, which is in a constant reinvention every day. And we are part of it. We are making it together through our gestures, [our] decisions.”

The evolution of a place and its people are shaped by many forces: economic, ecological, cultural, and political. Marzena Abrahamik’s work reflects the changes in cultural attitudes resulting from conflicts in Europe and a subsequent influx of Polish migrants to Chicago. Abrahamik’s deeply personal and political narratives highlight how countries and homelands shape us, as much as we shape them. Her series, Return, consists of five framed photographs and two larger collages which she installed on-site. The photos in the collage are a mélange of family photos, staged photographs, and Polish iconography (recognizable national symbols and mascots, Catholic icons, magazine photos, Polish landscapes). Collaged into large glass frames, Abrahamik’s images appear to be floating pieces of Polish and American identities, both on cultural and familial levels. Much like Topakian’s project hints at, though, there is an element of a melancholic perpetual foreignness that permeates Abrahamik’s work, a powerful meditation on the impossibility of assimilation into Chicago for many Polish migrants.

Transcription of audio interview with artist Marzena Abrahamik recorded by Jackson Roach: ”What does it mean to have a home or multiple homes, or what does it mean to belong? That idea of home, homeland, being homesick and never quite feeling like you belong anywhere is, I think, another condition of being an immigrant, right? It’s never quite fully formed. The way that American culture has been structured is in some wayspenetrable, but impenetrable. And no matter what we do and how we want to belong, we kind of don’t, you know?”

Image: Installation view, two collages by Marzena Abrahamik at the Chicago Cultural Center. The collages are two large glass frames hung against white walls with printed-out images organized and taped onto them. Courtesy of Villa Albertine.

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Environment/Environnement

Field recording: Lake Michigan in the summer, sounds of water and people.

The title of Marion Poussier’s series, On est là/We Are Here, references a French protest chant popularized during the 2018 gilets jaunes/yellow vests protests. She photographs people along the Canal Saint-Denis, which runs through some of the most underserved neighborhoods of Paris, showing urban waterfronts as a critical public space. The community in this part of Paris will be heavily impacted by the construction of new routes and structural changes being made to the city in preparation for the 2024 Summer Olympics. Through her art practice, Poussier is capturing crucial moments of a community’s relationship to its environment at risk of erasure.

Transcription of audio interview with artist Marion Poussier recorded by Jackson Roach: “Mon travail a consisté à me rendre sur place et essayer d’observer les populations qui vivent là et quels sont les usages qu’elles ont de ce lieu-là, qui sont leurs usages propres. Et je me suis concentrée précisément sur les berges du canal, donc comment les gens vivent sur le bord de l’eau et comment ils utilisent aussi parfois l’eau. Et avec l’idée que tout ça allait bien sûr disparaître, parce qu’avec les processus de gentrification, les populations les plus marginalisées ne vont pas profiter des changements et vont être repoussées plus loin encore en banlieue. Et donc voilà, c’est la disparition de ces gestes-là et de cette utilisation-là des lieux qui va disparaître. Donc je me suis attachée à rencontrer des personnes et à vraiment observer quels étaient leurs usages propres et leur manière de vivre dans ce lieu-là. [My work consisted of going there and trying to observe the populations who live there and what their uses are of the space. I focused specifically on the banks of the canal, how people live on the water’s edge and how they use the water. And with the idea that all this would of course disappear, because with the processes of gentrification, the most marginalized populations will not benefit from change and will be pushed even further into the suburbs. And so there it is, it is the disappearance of these interactions and this use of spaces that will disappear. So I set out to meet people and observe their customs and their way of living in that place.]”

One of Poussier’s images, Joy and Harry, shows two adolescents in conversation under a bridge against a graffiti-filled wall, with one cupping the other’s chin intimately. Others show groups of friends, or people using the canal water for washing. This series shows how intricately the environment and access to the canal are tied to the lives of the neighborhood inhabitants, and the key ways that the water serves the community.

Connections to water and feelings of belonging are also, in zakkiyyah dumas o’neal’s work, a poetic communing to be had with the city’s landscape. The series, in the open you are here (2023), also centers around a community’s relationship to the environment, specifically to water (calling to mind how Poussier conceives of the canal). Her still images of Chicago’s Lake Michigan, sometimes featuring her partner’s hands outstretched toward the calm water, encompass an intimacy in solitude outside the gaze of others.

Audio transcription of audio interview with artist zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal recorded by Jackson Roach: “Thinking about this relationship between, Black folks and access to leisure and access to bodies of water specifically with this exhibition, thinking about intimate observations of the south side that are not typically highlighted, that exists outside of the realm of, I would say, socioeconomic, political concerns. Although access to water and leisure, for me, I view as a socioeconomic concern I think about all of these things in relationship to Black interiority, in terms of how we access our aliveness and where we find beauty in our every day, whether it’s in nature, whether it’s a body of water.”

For dumas-o’neal, photography represents “an intimate language of gathering and assembling information that is personal.” Against the chaotic and heavy experience of being in a city, and specifically experiencing the city as someone confronted daily with the impositions of race, gender, work, and other structures acting on their lives, Lake Michigan in particular can serve as a space of universally accessible calm and leisure. Influenced by Kevin Quashie’s notion of “Black aliveness,” dumas-o’neal centers her everyday relationships with the built and natural environments around her, moving away from the omnipresent expectation to be grappling with our political and social realities at every moment.

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Intimité/Intimacy

Image: Installation view: A photo from Tonika Lewis Johnson’s Belonging series featuring three young Black men outside the turnstiles of a Paris metro station. Two of the men are standing, and the third is squatting. All three are looking directly into the camera. In the background, other photographs from the installation are partially visible. Courtesy of Villa Albertine. — Image: Installation view: A photo from Tonika Lewis Johnson’s *Belonging* series featuring three young Black men outside the turnstiles of a Paris metro station. Two of the men are standing, and the third is squatting. All three are looking directly into the camera. In the background, other photographs from the installation are partially visible. Courtesy of Villa Albertine.

Inherent to living in a city is the friction of our stories being inextricably always about our environment and its people. Tonika Lewis Johnson’s series, Belonging (2023), is a continuation of a project she began in Chicago about experiencing the city as a racialized person, asking young people of color to talk about a place when they were made to feel like they didn’t belong, and then photographing them in that location. Alongside the photographs, where the subjects are looking straight on at the camera, Johnson has recorded interviews where the subjects talk about the experience they had in that place. There is a unique intimacy created by the combination of a still photograph and recorded sound; our focus is entirely on the storyteller’s experience, and their gaze is turned on the viewer describing situations when an oppressive gaze was imposed upon them. In extending her project to Europe (inspired, in part, by the video collaboration between A$AP Rocky and British rapper Skepta), Johnson found a wealth of dialogue to be had across languages and cities.

Transcription of audio interview with Tonika Lewis Johnson recorded by Jackson Roach: “The commonalities that emerged were unbelievable. Specifically, one that was enlightening to me, because right before coming to Paris, I had the opportunity to go to London. And let me tell you, going from the United States, London, and France, very economically strong countries with significant history in the world I was like, wow. The Black people in each of these countries have a unique understanding of each other And it’s because we’re all from very rich countries, and so when we complain about social issues and injustices, it’s a bit different because these are the countries that other people want to migrate to, so that was a really strong connection.”

In the works of Sasha Phyars-Burgess, who came to Chicago as part of the Diane Dammeyer Fellowship in Photographic Arts and Social Issues, we see video clips and portraits taken in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago as well as in Clichy-sous-Bois, a neighborhood of Paris where she was invited to do a residency by the Ateliers Médicis. In addition to the still photography installed at BUILD and the Chicago Cultural Center, Phyars-Burgess’ fellowship culminated in a video installation on view only at the Cultural Center, where she captured intimate moments from the lives of youth affected by gun violence participating in a program to equip them with job skills. A large part of her work seeks to excavate moments of intimacy, joy, and a generally full range of emotion in a context where so often, broad strokes paint an incomplete understanding of a community. As her series moves from the training center to the insides of peoples’ homes and families, the scenes both candid and staged reveal that in every interaction, there is an intimacy to be found the longer you stay and observe a neighborhood.

Installation view: A rectangular collage of Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ work against a purple wall at BUILD Chicago in Austin. The collage includes several portraits of individuals and couples, as well as still scenes of hallways and objects like light shining on a plastic cup of water. All of the photographs are in black-and-white. Courtesy of Villa Albertine.

Transcription of audio interview with artist Sasha Phyars-Burgess recorded by Jackson Roach: “My method and way of photographing was to spend time with people. So I stayed. The fellowship itself was just one year, but I ended up staying in Chicago for three years because COVID happened in 2020. I stayed for three years and continued photographing. I continued photographing and I think what my goal was, or what my intent was, rather, was to really just be an observer in a way. The first thing that I had access to were the landscapes, so I photographed landscapes first. And then the longer that I was in Chicago, I got to kind of go into the interior. And I felt like being able to get into the interiors of people’s homes and also take photographs inside of interiors allowed me to bring across the element of people. People live here, which is really important to me. And I felt as though it was the thing that I really wanted to drill in on: that people are living their lives here.”

Transcription of audio interview with artist Sasha Phyars-Burgess recorded by Jackson Roach: ”I’m just interested in photography because it allows you to look longer than, you know, just seeing can provide. It allows you to go deeper if you choose to. And then I think in particular, with photographing cities in a city like Chicago, it just allows a kind of archaeological mapping that I think is important to understand the present [state] of a city, I think in order to know where you want to go, you should try your best to know where you came from.”

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CONCLUSION/CONCLUSION

Through the eyes of these ten photographers they build a cosmopolitan collage of different ways of seeing two cities. What their patterns reveal–whether it is invisible labor, transnational parallels of racialized experiences, or the history and communities that constantly join and change the city–is a practice of engaging with our surroundings deeply.

Transcription of audio interview with artists Marion Poussier and Sasha Phyars-Burgess recorded by Jackson Roach.

Poussier: “J’ai l’impression qu’il y a un qui se fait parce qu’on parle aussi, en tout cas dans les projets que j’ai pu voir sur Chicago, de choses qui se font un peu sur les banlieues ou les communautés un peu mises à l’écart. Après, je pense que dans les discussions qu’il va y avoir, les liens vont se créer, peut-être. [I have the impression that there is a dialogue taking place because we are all talking, at least in the projects that I have seen, about things that are being done in somewhat sidelined communities. Afterward, I think that more discussions will take place, and links will be created.]”

Phyars-Burgess: “All of our work is trying to look and give voice or light to certain areas in the world, the peripheries of Paris, or the peripheries of Chicago, or neighborhoods in Chicago. I think all of us are looking for ways to make sense of the world that we’re in. You know, whether that be through parakeets, or if that be through, you know, riding the RER B I think all of us are trying to make sense of the landscape in whatever ways we, we, we can, you know?”

Reaching my destination at the end of the red line, my mind remains with the artists of Opening Passages and the ways of inhabiting the city that they’ve pushed me to consider. Anonymous riders and I ignore each other companionably, staring out the window or at our phones, saturated by a constant blur of visual stimuli. At several points in Opening Passages, we are encouraged to notice more of each other, the long commutes, the moods of Lake Michigan, city-dwelling wildlife, and structural designs that pattern the world around us.

About the author: Mrittika Ghosh (she/her) is a Bengali-American reader, writer, and translator currently based in Chicago. She holds a BA from Mount Holyoke College and an MA from the University of Chicago. She has also been a bookseller, oral historian, and educator. Her writing focuses on queerness, migration, and postcolonial art in Francophone and South Asian diasporic contexts.

About the AV producer: I make things for public radio and podcasts (some collected here), and I’m the associate producer at The Dig. At different times, I’ve also worked at State of the Human, Radiolab, Generation Anthropocene, Raw Data, Third Coast, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstores. You can reach me at jackson.w.roach@gmail.com.