projects > Shadow Reclamation Act

Think of the incarcerees, and what they reclaim from the desert in order to sustain their bodies and their spirits when almost everything else has been taken away. Out of the dust they make farms, and build swimming holes; they scavenge wood scraps to make furniture and shoes; they burn sagebrush when the coal doesn't come and the temperature plummets in the Idaho winter of '42.

Across the world, think of a shadow seared by the bomb's blast on to the steps of a bank in Hiroshima. Survivors vie for familial connection to the shadow: to lay claim to the last gesture of a vanished loved one.

Centuries earlier, think of the myth of Dibutades; she invents drawing when she traces a shadow
to stand in for her departing lover.

Think of the desert sun by day, and watchtower searchlights by night. The American concentration camps were cities of constant shadows.