3191 Mission StreetSan Francisco, CA 94110Google Map »
-an SFAI-sponsored Exhibition-
Opening Thursday, 28 May 2009, 8:00-11:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Fridays and Saturdays from 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. or by appointment
In 1985, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors backed a resolution designating San Francisco a sanctuary city-one of the first in the US-for certain Central American refugees. The resolution decreed that police, schools, and health and social-service agencies were forbidden from assisting INS agents during potential investigations and arrests of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees. Though the legislation was revised in the 90s and has been broadly and variously interpreted since its initial enactment, it remains in effect. Nevertheless, in the wake of federal policies implemented after 9/11, San Francisco began to see an increased number of federal immigration raids, leading to growing fear and paranoia not only among undocumented immigrants, but among legal residents as well.
Sanctuary City/Ciudad Santuario, 1989-2009 is the fruition of a two-year process of investigation and research prompted by this post-9/11 increase in federal immigration raids. By consulting with a number of local nonprofits (the ACLU, the Edgewood Center for Children and Families, the Mission Asset Fund, the Mission Economic Development Agency, ¡Poder!, and La Voz Latina,) as well as with national NGOs, international think tanks, and governmental agencies, the team of artists led by Sergio De La Torre- including Karla Claudio Betancourt (SFAI student), Dina Roumiantseva (SFAI student), Wenhua Shi, Rosario Alicia Sotelo (SFAI alumna), and Chris Treggiari (SFAI student)-has assembled a bloc of video projections and photographs, together with a text-based installation and limited-edition timeline, that explores and questions the ways in which this pattern of increased federal intervention has affected the Bay Area immigrant community.
Based on the methodology used for Maquilapolis, a documentary film project developed by De La Torre and Vicky Funari for which twelve factory workers in Tijuana, Mexico, were taught to use cameras and editing equipment so they could tell their own stories, Sanctuary City/Ciudad Santuario, 1989-2009 will similarly involve its subjects as creative participants, thereby directly situating the work in the exhibition within the milieu out of which it was generated. Together with testimonies by family members directly involved in the raids and commentaries by local politicians on San Francisco's status as a sanctuary city, the exhibition's video projections will be screened guerrilla-style-both during and after the exhibition-on the facades of those buildings throughout the city that have been raided by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
