(Inflating Agitation)

Related Tactics
36″ x 54″ each
inkjet print
2022

(Inflating Agitation) is a series by Related Tactics (Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nate Watson) that features an inflatable/deflatable monument base temporarily installed in specific sites that speak to often invisible moments in local community histories, particularly those linked to labor & social justice movements. The surface design of the deflatable suggests a plinth marked by guerrilla graffiti during national protests, subsequently painted over in blocky institutional gray–an acknowledgement that even without a figure upon its platform, the object continues to serve as a site for public negotiation and intervention around collective memory, power, and knowledge building.

In this set of photographs, we’ve deployed the temporary marker in Berkeley as an acknowledgement of the community struggles anchored in the sites we’ve identified, while leaving visible the energy and mechanisms (the blower & generator) that are needed to keep it inflated and activated. Unlike a marble edifice, the marker and the memory must be refreshed and tended to keep the stories alive in public discourse.

Berkeley sites in the series include parks and former factory buildings, some more visibly preserved and marked than others. At one site, the deflatable is squeezed into a pier honoring the Peet/Colgate-Palmolive factory that once operated nearby. In 1961, their workers went on strike, advocating for a union. In archives, images of the largely Black protesters contrast with advertisements extolling the cleaning power of the company’s products, including Crystal White Family Soap. In another photograph, the deflatable has been tucked into the greenery at Aquatic Park, near the site where Frank Bartley, a young gay man was killed by vice police in 1969. While his murderers were cleared and blame was placed on Bartley for resisting arrest, subsequent community protests were one of the radicalizing events in local gay rights movement building.

(Inflating Agitation) is part of Memories Breathe and Every Monument Deflates, a body of work in which Related Tactics examines the mechanisms of history-making: framing devices that disseminate and structure stories of place, cities, and value systems, but are often hidden in plain sight, receding into the background in service of the ideologies they enact. We intervene in these tools–including postcards and photographs, statuary plinths, and cartographic processes–to bring them to the fore, invite questions, and make apparent the ways the systems of knowledge they structure undergird our local and national discourses, regardless of whether they are currently present in the landscape.

Exhibition history:
Print Public, Kala Art Institute (2022)