excerpt
On Paperwork

"On Paperwork" by Laurie Allen and Paul M. Farber is excerpted from the Reflecting Authority zine, which features research findings from a series of local workshops, data visualizations, critical essays from Monument Lab, and snippets from our podcast series with artists from our collaboration with the High Line Network Joint Art Initiative’s New Monuments for New Cities.

B1d198fe 9f40 48a1 A49e E1add309ef3f (dragged) 2


Paperwork is a hidden pathway to making change in public space. Permits, applications, surveys, calls for participation, certificates of insurance, and contracts – the imaginative backend of bureaucracy. The filling out of paperwork can be a simple way to access one’s rightful spaces; but more often than not, paperwork is a barrier, with opaque language, legalese phrasings, unjust exclusions, and escape clauses. Anyone who has tried to make change has experienced the feeling that a paper form was designed to slow down change – to protect a status quo. 

Forms sometimes ask the wrong questions, assume the wrong intentions. Paperwork can embody and symbolize an elongated and needless process, an entrenchment of institutional systems and realities. If one even gets to the point of having the right paperwork to enact possibility or make an impact, many of us are familiar with the feel and fear of having one’s destiny stuck in a pile of paper and manila folders. Or, as paperwork goes virtual, a backlogged intake system, never-ending clicks and red exclamation point warnings telling you your information can’t be processed, or holding on the phone and being told our “options have changed.”  In civic and institutional spaces that feel like mazes, if you can’t locate the form to fill out, or the form doesn’t exist, you hit an impasse.

B1d198fe 9f40 48a1 A49e E1add309ef3f
Public think tank, HighLine, New York City. October 2019. (Monument Lab)

At the same time, despite its obvious frustrations (and with time, resources, and persistence), paperwork can be used to enable change. To locate possibilities and parameters rendered in mundane steps. Filling out a form can signify that there actually is a process, an official path to accomplish a goal. It signifies that progress is possible, and can serve as a defense of one’s right to assemble, speak, or move through space. It also counts as evidence, and tracing the path of history often requires looking through the paperwork that enabled or inhibited change. 

B1d198fe 9f40 48a1 A49e E1add309ef3f (dragged) (dragged)
Public think tank, HighLine, New York City. October 2019. (Monument Lab)

Paperwork is the marker of official process. Doing paperwork means that you have found a way into the system. What do you do when you want to try to examine, interrogate, and re-imagine the system itself? For this, one must look outside the official channels, and explore the creative world where people dip in and out of official processes. In contemporary public art, we see artist-activists exploring the edges of the system every day. They lead and are a part of growing movements to challenge historic systems of white supremacy, sexism, and colonial oppression. Artist-activists include people who go around the system – pulling down racist and sexist monuments, changing the names of parks on Google Maps, taking over advertising platforms, and organizing and protesting, among other urgent tactics. It also includes practitioners who model new processes of decision making through projects that utilize creative paperwork to re-imagine more just systems, including Monument Lab, Paper Monuments, Colored Conventions, and the Decolonial Task Force, among many others. 

B1d198fe 9f40 48a1 A49e E1add309ef3f
From the Reflecting Authority zine. 

These activations call for re-imagined systems that employ more critical contention with  history and memory in public spaces. Creative re-imaginings and interventions designed to re-construct a more just world exist alongside other kinds of participatory exercises –those that nestle within, rather than reflect on, routine systems of power. 

In an era in which public engagement is expected but systematic change remains difficult, we remain wary of engagement without critical questions, invitations for input without influence. Scholar Shannon Mattern unpacks this phenomenon in her essay “Post-It Note City, ”on the processes and pitfalls of participatory design, in which she writes, “‘Participation’ is now deployed as part of a public performance wherein the aesthetics of collaboration signify democratic process, without always providing the real thing.” In these instances, engagement, rather than maintaining a network of mutual relationships and generating new knowledge, becomes another step on a private checklist.

In the case of reckoning with and remediating our public sites of memory, we have reached a point that necessarily means participation must not be perfunctory or frivolous. We need processes and outcomes that grapple with the life cycles of historical memory, especially those that have shaped public spaces in inequitable ways.  

B1d198fe 9f40 48a1 A49e E1add309ef3f
Findings from the Reflecting Authority zine. 

For Reflecting Authority, we gathered paperwork not as a process of proposing a monument or deciding what to put in a park or collectively design for a city, but to understand the mechanics and the mindsets that support the evolution of public spaces. Part of the reason we used this paperwork was to experiment and adjust the kinds of questions that residents and visitors are often asked in public engagement. Across our workshops, we found people creatively imagining future uses of public spaces that also  reckon with the complexities of history, process, and power. Through observations on their own local sites, participants rendered a broader portrait of the life cycles of public spaces, ones in which histories of gentrification and segregation are present alongside plans for renovation and redevelopment. These paper forms described processes of formation and control in which artists, neighbors, students, and homeless people collaborate and tangle with municipal agencies, conservancies, and business owners to truly shape public spaces. In this pile of creative paperwork, they authored understandings of public pasts in the changing present.

Paul M. Farber, PhD Director , Monument Lab

Paul M. Farber is Director of Monument Lab. He is also Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Public Art and Space at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

www.paulfarber.com
Paul_farber
Paul_farber
Laurie Allen Director of Research, Monument Lab

Laurie Allen is Director of Research for Monument Lab.

liblaurie
liblaurie