We too, traverse the earth

11:11 minutes; 2019

This film contrasts the Women’s Suffrage Movement of the 1910’s with landscape architect A.D. Taylor’s design philosophy for Forest Hills Park, located in East Cleveland, Ohio, the first city east of the Mississippi to allow women the right to vote. The park’s design was intended to promote harmonious social order, allowing women a place, free from the sins of the city, to experience nature. The narrator elicits memories, recollections, and dreams echoing the work of suffragist, educator and botanist Harriet Keeler, who argued for the presence of wild flowers and natural flora in urban parks decades before Taylor devalued the native plant life of Forest Hills. The film itself focuses on elements of abandonment within the park. Shot entirely in the winter months the lack of movement, few signs of life and the overcast grey skies speak of absence, longing, and pain. While the narration describes specific and concealed occurrences as a speculative approach to exploring the present-day environment as a space of suppressed stories embedded within the contemporary experience.

The metal legs become frames through which one’s perspective of the world can be examined from a new position. By altering the orientation of one’s head we are given a moment to mediate on the value of and our relationship to space. These street corners give the appearance of the ‘everyday’ while being embedded in the history of women’s suffrage as locations that women stationed themselves to petition men to support their cause.