Transition Times II

The images presented here were exhibited in “Transition Times II: Reconfiguring Structures of Power at Turk and Taylor” at the CounterPulse, an art center in San Francisco's Tenderloin District, during the summer of 2024. All artists were part of the TurkxTaylor Initiative (TxT), an ad hoc group that came together to liberate and envision an alternative future for the landmark site of the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria riot—a trans and queer uprising against police violence. Unfortunately, the historic site is currently owned by a transnational private prison corporation called GEO Group and operated as a for‐profit reentry service facility.“Transition Times II” is the second exhibition of a larger project by TxT. The first exhibition, “Transition Times: Re‐Membering Anticarceral Resistance in the Tenderloin,” looked at the past, making public Susan Stryker's outstanding archival collection and contextualizing Compton's riot in urban space. “Transition Times II” looks toward the future, employing the power of collective imagination to dismantle and reconfigure structures of power, offering alternative ways of relating. Through the process of “unbuilding,” the artists resignify the meaning of structures of power, challenge social norms, and use the building as a representation of that transition. The exercise is not about architectural design but about speculative exploration without constraints. The artists work within the void of creative imagination, conjuring new realities and holding space for the broadest vision of justice possible.The exhibitions’ titles reference the performance artist Julian Carter's (2023: 131) reflections on how “gender transition as embodied gesture raises questions about related issues of continuity, retroflexion, and anticipation.” Carter explains how, in dance, transition “joins references to time and references to space in ways that allow us to consider the dimension of embodied relationality that involves movement” (141–42). Transition time folds back toward the past body that no longer exists and propels future embodiment in a “trans‐embrace.” As we remember Compton's Cafeteria riot as a pivotal time of anticarceral resistance in the Tenderloin, the present arises as another transitional time when we can collectively unbuild and reconfigure the utopian space of possibility that Compton's once was.The TurkxTaylor Initiative (TxT) is a nonhierarchical ad hoc group that came together to liberate and envision an alternative future for the landmark site of the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria riot—a trans and queer uprising against police violence—in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. Unfortunately, the building is currently owned by a private prison corporation called GEO Group, which operates it as a for‐profit reentry service facility.Helen Bronston is a transgender woman, architect, photographer, historian, teacher, and artist. She is an associate with SmithGroup in San Francisco, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, and an instructor in architectural theory at Academy of Art University. Helen received her master's in architecture from Harvard University and her bachelor's in anthropology from Yale University, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Germany. Architecture from this trans woman's brain lives in the public sphere across the United States, from Boston to Long Beach, from Seattle to San Francisco, from Richmond and Oakland to Philadelphia.Spencer Bundoc (they/he) is an artist who received their bachelor's degree in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. Their work in architecture centers on the life and death of queer spaces, the histories of these spaces, and architecture's connection with the human body's position in different axes of power. As an artist, they are primarily a painter, but they love to experiment with film, crochet, digital art and animation, screen printing, soundscapes, and fashion.Isabella Torres is an architect and Latina transgender woman who graduated in Colombia in 1987 and specialized in urban and environmental management. After her graduation, she worked for the government as an architect specialist in urban environments on the construction of housing, schools, and other infrastructure projects such as a military base and Republic Bank. Since 2017 she has been protected and in asylum here in San Francisco, owing to political persecution as a union leader and defender of human rights of the transgender community in her country. She is a member of the carpenters’ union in San Francisco and is studying construction management at City College.Ellen (she/her/theirs) is a semiotics junkie. a degenerate mestiza. She eats. She is filled. She bioaccumulates. She is a filter. She steals to stay alive. a Vulture, Weasel, Hyena, Parasite. She will be referred to as “parasite”: para: feeding beside. para:: site . . . taking from what you have not nurtured or cultivated. All are parasites to mother. parasites: one who lives at another's expense, who eats at the table of another earning his welcome through flattery.This exhibition was made possible with the support of the CounterPulse Curator in Residence Program, the Graham Foundation, and the Joan E. Draper Architectural History Research Endowment from the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Very special thanks to Susan Stryker for her insights and feedback on this artwork. We thank the Tenderloin—its land, its groundwater, its air, and the humans and more‐than‐humans that constitute its transecology—for making all this possible

Constructive · Corporation · Exhibition · Meaning (existential · Power (physics · Prison · Queer · Transition (genetics · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Theatre and Performance Studies · Architecture