Rough Cuts

March 2025

Group exhibition at Taubman College’s Liberty Research Annex

This exhibition featured production from the research project Documenting Demolition, which examines the impact of Detroit’s demolition program, which began in 2014 with the goal of removing 40,000 blighted properties, many of them single family homes. While the demolition of these homes is often accepted as a necessary step forward, this project questions the true motivation for demolition and reflects on how memories and culture connected to the homes can still be preserved.

The exhibition included the documentation of demolished houses and houses slated for demolition, treating them with historical significance through detailed drawings that honor their architectural value and the stories of their past residents. This preservationist approach shifts the narrative from that of market-driven urban renewal to one that emphasizes the importance of memory and community history.How does one memorialize or monumentalize ahome?

Documenting Demolition:
2024 -

Experimental Preservation & Memorialization
of Demolition in Detroit

The Detroit Demolition Program began in
2014, with the aim of demolishing or deconstructing 40,000 blighted properties. In many ways, the project was, and still is, seen as a positive and long-needed move for the city of Detroit, as neglected buildings clear the way for new development.

However, the issue is not so clear cut. While many Detroiters have applauded the city’s demolition efforts, many also feel conflicted. There is something confounding about celebrating the demolition of so many thousands of homes in a city that has already seen so much loss.

This project, stemming initially from an investigation of the house that my grandfather grew up in (11794 Whithorn St.) is ultimately concerned with the engagement of design research, and a speculative architecture—a new memorial typology–that attempts to build on my previous research and academic inquiry in public monuments and memory by memorializing or monumentalizing the lost and soon-to-be-lost homes in Detroit. In turn, the project aims to preserve some memory of Detroit’s decline and the collective trauma that was faced by residents of the city.

Research from the first phase of the fellowship was presented in a group exhibition ‘Rough Cuts’ at Taubman College’s Liberty Annex in Ann Arbor, MI in April 2025.

Rags / Stracci
2023 -

A Funerary

Celebration for

Pier Paolo Pasolini
A large-scale installation in Rome’s Torre Fiscale park in celebration of the anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini. The anniversary offers an opportunity to reflect on the artist’s relationship to the urban fringes of Rome that intersect with the ancient infrastructure of the aqueduct Felice. This aqueduct, carrying water across the many layers of the city, bore witness to nearly 2000 years of urban transformation.

With this idea as a starting point, we propose to create a site-specific installation, dedicated to Pasolini and to the oft-neglected stories of the people he highlighed in his films. The proposed site for the installation is the path defined by the Acquedotto Felice, which starts from the Roman countryside, and cuts through the south-east section of the city, running between the major arteries of via Tuscolana and via Appia, on its way to the urban center.

“For he who only knows your color, red flag,
you must really exist, so that he can exist:
he who was covered with scabs is covered with wounds, the laborer becomes a beggar,
the Neapolitan a Calabrese, the Calabrese an African, the illiterate a buffalo or dog.
He who hardly knows your color, red flag,
won’t know you much longer, not even with his senses: you who already boast so many bourgeois and working class glories, you become a rag again, and the poorest wave you.”

-Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente, prefaced by Alberto Moravia (City Lights Books: San Francisco, 1986), pp. 78-79.

A People’s Monument
for Rome:

May 2025

Spring Travel Course, Taubman College

“What is Rome? Where is the real Rome? Where does it begin and where does it end? Rome is surely the most beautiful city in Italy, if not the world. But it is also the most ugly, the most welcoming, the most dramatic, the richest, the most wretched…The contradictions of Rome are difficult to transcend because they are contradictions of an existential order. Rather than traditional contradictions, between wealth and misery, happiness and horror, they are part of a magma, a chaos. To the eyes of the foreigner and the visitor, Rome is the city contained within the old Renaissance walls. The rest is a vague, anonymous periphery, unworthy of interest.”
-Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The City’s True Face,” Stories from the City of God, 2003 translation, (pg. 165-166)

This course engaged what poet, film director, artist and political thinker Pier Paolo Pasolini described as the “...vague, anonymous periphery” of Rome. Students had the opportunity to explore the historic center from the inside-out, and also to study the city from the outside (of the walls)-out. Through films of Pasolini (Accattone, 1961, Mamma Roma, 1962, La Ricotta, 1963, etc), selected readings, site visits both within and outside of Rome, and lectures from local architects, activists, and thinkers, students were exposed to an understanding of the city in all of its complex rings and layers.

The course also explored the question of monuments and monumentality within the context of Rome. When is a monument purely a monument and when does infrastructure become a monument? What is a monument in the center of Rome vs. in the periphery and where do these definitions overlap or diverge? How do monuments define public space and how has tourism affected the privatization of monuments in Rome? As previously-public spaces defined by monuments in the center have become ticketed and overcrowded tourist attractions, what and where is the new public in Rome? These questions served as catalysts for a broader discussion of the ownership of public space.

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