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Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyzes the visual/material culture of the People's Park Movement as an “archaeology of displacement,” exploring how activists enacted political placemaking through murals, landscape architecture, and other ephemera that illuminate alternative archival possibilities for activism.

Paper long abstract:

The amorphous People’s Park movement was a sporadic chain of more than four dozen protests in the late Vietnam War era in which activists protested a range of issues including police brutality, gentrification, and systemic racism by taking over vacant lots and insurgently converting those lots into "liberated zones" they often called "people’s parks." Most of these park projects were ephemeral, often being fenced or torn down by police days after construction began. Park creators, therefore, archived their protests—creating and compiling their own materials outside the bounds of institutional archives. Since the late-1960s, supporters have memorialized their movements through galleries, books, and later archival collections, websites, and social media accounts to construct their own historical memories of these protest actions counter to the state, yet often times analysis of these movements has been reduced to photographs and memoirs rather than the craftivist innovations that originally dominated their movements. While scholarship on the relationship between archives and activism has tended to focus on community archives, the People’s Park Movement's disparate constellation of parks and archival materials presents an alternative lens through which to explore material culture through the lens of historical memory and social movement organizing. Through tangible archives of scattered wine jugs, handmade signs, misshapen sculptures, and printed newspapers, activists sought to “liberate” privatized urban green space. In doing so, they left behind an archaeology of displacement that illuminates how activists were using visual and material culture to explore issues of identity, colonialism, and coalition-bulding within the urban realm.