Views From the Street: Cultural Landscapes Over Time
How Cultural and Artistic Practices Foster Urban Accountability
Written by Erica Waltemade, Edited by Robin Abad Ocubillo
It was suddenly much harder to just walk into a place and photograph — now there were locked gates, door buzzers, lawyers…
On Saturday, September 25th, 2021, YBCA opened its theater doors to vaccinated visitors for the first time in over a year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The occasion was a day of programming, SoMa Social Landscapes, featuring the films and panels that centered around the SF Urban Film Fest’s exhibition Echo Location: The Cultural Geopolitics in South of Market, currently on view until October 23rd, 2021.
The day began with a sold-out event featuring two film screenings. The first was Janet Delaney and Laura Graham’s The View from Langton Street, a short film of interviews and portraits of her South of Market (SoMa) neighbors from the late 1970s and early 1980s; and Alleluia Panis’ film, Rico: SoMa Pinoy, about a beloved community leader in the Filipinx community. Following the screenings was a panel discussion with Janet Delaney and Alleluia Panis, moderated by Echo Location exhibition Lead Curator and SFUFF Program Producer, Robin Abad Ocubillo.
The View from Langton Street is a film made up of conversations and photographs of the residents of Langton Street, originally exhibited in 1980 as a two-projector slideshow put together by Laura Graham and Janet Delaney, who were roommates living at 62 Langton Street at the time. The work, recently reformatted as a film, is an intimate snapshot of this diverse neighborhood amid rampant upheaval due to the brand new Moscone Center that had just been built blocks away. Subjects interviewed in 1980 for the film thought that the Urban Renewal project caused thousands of residents and hundreds of businesses to be displaced. Rents were increasing, and new residents were moving in in rapid succession.
This film, along with the accompanying photographs of the neighbors and their neighborhood amid massive change, is an incredible historical document that parallels urgent contemporary conversations around the cost of living in San Francisco, gentrification, and displacement of minority and vulnerable communities; as well as the need to protect those communities. It is jarring to hear some of the interviews expounding on issues that feel so relevant to the neighborhood as it exists today:
“…Using the term ‘Zone of Transition’ is a way to sidestep real problems and looks at what goes on inside of a city, as if whatever happened there wasn’t the result of speculation, exploitation, manipulation, and decay — but was just a day in the life of an organism that just happens to be a city,” says one subject whose interview was included as a voice-over in the film. “And now, gentrification as I understand it is the establishment of a higher class in an area which was formerly identified with a lower class, this is like what is happening on Langton Street. I am taking advantage of this myself — I displaced somebody and my presence here works to maintain the same mechanisms I took advantage of…What will happen to the people that have lived here and are renting? I suspect it will not go well — I expect that they will have to go live in the further reaches of the Bay Area.”
The process of making this piece found Delaney and Graham spending their nights and weekends getting to know their neighbors, showing up at their workplaces, and hanging out in their kitchens. They wanted the residents to see themselves in the artwork, so the artists installed a 45-minute slideshow at 80 Langton, an alternative art gallery, for everyone to attend. The artists felt that even though the neighbors knew one another by sight and perhaps had exchanged pleasantries, showing the slideshow as the centerpiece of a neighborhood event would be a great way to allow people on Langton to get to know one another on a more personal level.
Delaney returned to photograph the South of Market neighborhood in 2011 during another development boom; that time brought on by the tech industry. She was interested in capturing how places of work had changed in the area, from blue-collar factories and warehouses to startup offices. Delaney notes, “ It was suddenly much harder to just walk into a place and photograph — now there were locked gates, door buzzers, lawyers…”
When discussing the noticeable differences between when she first began photographing SoMa in the early 80s to 2011, Delaney said, “Nothing stays the same. When I was here in the 80s, I knew there was a large Filipino community — I could smell the food — there wasn’t a sense of organizing that was visible at that time. The level of organizing was growing, much more vibrant, communities — in particular, the LGBTQ and Filipino community — the effort to define themselves as a community, creating space for themselves.”
The next film, Rico: SoMa Pinoy is a documentary film made in 2018 that centers on Rico Riemedio, a Filipino community leader. Rico grew up on Russ Street in SoMa, and in his youth, was a victim of systemic police predation against communities of color, surviving over 20 years in prison.
Alleluia Panis co-directed this film with Wilfred Galila. She is a multimedia artist, dancer, and choreographer, and the Director of Kularts, a performing and visual arts collectives. Alleluia began experimenting with film as part of live performances in 2014 to expand and explore the inner landscape of characters that she was developing as a choreographer in her dance pieces. This character-driven exploration in her practice led her to think about the stories in her community that she could tell. Her interest was in discussing difficult, often taboo subjects for the Filipinx community — particularly incarceration, which carries shame and stigma for the families experiencing it. As an elder within the Filipino community, Alleluia felt that she was at a place in her life where she felt able to tell these more challenging topics, and meeting Rico and hearing his story was an inspiration for her.
“I realized his [Rico] story really embodied the Filipino diaspora here in the United States and SoMa, and so we started to do a piece, my team and I realized that we should really be documenting this,” reflected Panis during the discussion after the screening. “So that’s how this became a documentary, it didn’t start out to make a documentary, but the artwork pushed us in that direction because it’s such an important story.”
Rico’s status as a beloved community leader was made clear to the audience that day by the group of youths accompanying him from United Playaz, where he works as a case manager. The group joyously rooting Rico on throughout the event underscores the importance of the work that he, and by extension, Alleluia and her partners are doing to preserve, celebrate, and advance the multi-generational Filipinx diaspora in South of Market and beyond.
This event took place on September 25, 2021 at YBCA in San Francisco. For more information about the SF Urban Film Fest, visit our website.
Echo Location: The Cultural Geopolitics in South of Market
is an exhibition and programming series centering the experience of two historically marginalized groups essential to the heritage of San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood (SoMa): Filipinx and LGBTQIA+ communities. Featuring visual arts, film, and theatre, Echo Location reflects on the power these communities hold, overlapping both culturally and geographically over time. Echo Location is curated by Robin Abad Ocubillo and organized by the SF Urban Film Fest, in partnership with Filipino International Cine Festival (FACINE) and Bindlestiff Studio. Co-presenters include Kultivate Labs, Kapwa Gardens, and SoMa Pilipinas. The exhibition is on display at the YBCA Galleries through October 23rd, 2021.
