Storefront For Art and Architecture: ‘Homelands’ / Elise Hunchuck’s ‘Below this point, follow the stones’

This summer, we launched an Open Call for research proposals as a part of our Homelands cycle. The jury—Aruna D’Souza, Ming Lin, Paulo Tavares, Terence Trouillot, Mark Wasiuta—selected researcher Elise Misao Hunchuck, for her project Below this point, follow the stones.

Hunchuck examines how risk is inscribed into the ground, following the stones, flood marks, and gauge readings by which communities record catastrophe and instruct those who come after. Her proposal develops a decade of fieldwork—an ongoing atlas of some 300 monuments—into a new multimedia installation. Below this point, follow the stones extends a practice concerned with how landscapes hold memory and how communities encode loss and instruction in material form, grounded in the premise that landscapes are never given, but rather made and unmade deliberately.

As part of her participation in Homelands, Hunchuck recently joined us in Kosovo for our Runik Summit, where she shared her research with other architects, artists and curators.

This Open Call season includes a Special Mention from our jury, architect and researcher Farah Alkhoury. Her work—which examines environmental violence and political entanglements as consequential to architecture and spatial thinking—will be featured in our forthcoming Homelands Reader. Alkhoury will also host a program at the gallery.

Homelands is a long-term research cycle and exhibition series which delves into the political dimensions of memory—examining what is obscured or distorted in the dominant record—through the work of artists and architects who unmake and remake their connection to place.