 Good afternoon, everyone. You may notice a few conspicuous absences today. First, there is no one to introduce me. Second, there is no me, not in the sense you're used to anyway. I hope you are confused. As some of you may know, today is a national women's strike, a day without women. This brown bag lecture was scheduled months before the strike was planned. Indeed, even before the series of recent events which have brought many in the US to new engagement in the political process and new awareness of the need to protect the rights and freedoms of all human beings in this country. Today, I am striking as a human first and foremost, as a woman by happy accident, as a teacher and writer by choice, as an academic and a graduate student by profession, and as a person deeply disturbed by the positions of the current political administration on human rights, environmental rights, economic rights, and on and on. The coincidence of the strike and this brown bag caused me to reflect on what my labor means, how it manifests, and what responsibility I have to anticipate. The organizers of the strike gave somewhat confusing instructions. One, do not engage in paperwork. Two, do not engage in unpaid work. Three, avoid spending money. The relationship of payment for intellectual work sent me sinning. I considered many options for how to proceed. Simply cancel or reschedule this talk, let the space remain empty, move the talk to the open mic on Sprout Plaza, where, in fact, I am now. Or better yet, to the album involved itself. The purpose of the strike is to disrupt normal day-to-day operations. And any of those options would have done so. But simply removing my lecture from the schedule would not be so unusual. It happened two weeks ago. And moving my lecture might open this work up to new audiences in a meaningful way, but would still be a demonstration of unpaid labor. And so I decided to be here but not be here and to distribute the labor of my talk to you, the audience. For those of you who know my work, a performative move like this might seem like a wound, an opportunity. It might seem like I'm capitalizing on the event of the strike to further explore my interests and performance and the intersection of art and research. The purpose of the strike is to demonstrate the unnoticed or unappreciated contributions of a group of people. The trains will not run, schools and restaurants will close. I am here but not here because striking as a female academic is a risk, as all striking is. The only person set to lose if I didn't show up to work today was myself. So this is the best I have. Please press the right arrow key to advance to the next slide and begin reading. I'd like to open by reading a few excerpts from an essay written by photographers Lewis Balz and Anthony Hernandez in 1995. The essay accompanied Hernandez's Landscapes for the Homeless, a series of photographs and encampments under Los Angeles's freeways. Given the current political climate, I cannot begin a talk about an archeology of homelessness without impressing on my audience the context from which the phenomena of displacement arises. I cannot begin without noting the similarities between past eras and the present. The continuation of a phenomenon. Balz and Hernandez, I think, do it better than I could hope to do, so can I leave it to them. And quote, Californians have always taken a perverse pride in being the initiators of most of the pop culture trends that swept the nation and sometimes the world. And quote. Talas sum qualas eras. I am what you will be. Homelessness as a contemporary industrial scale phenomenon probably began in California in the late 60s when then Governor Reagan closed the state mental institutions and turned the mad loose in the streets. A conditioned vodriard likened to the breaking of a seal of the apocalypse. Not really the dangerously mad, just the weak, the helpless, and the incompetent. Even the word homeless as a noun is reason. The homeless, neither voters nor consumers, the disenfranchised and without economic subjecthood have rather suddenly become a permanent fixture in America's ossifying caste system. Like Iraqi civilian casualties in the Gulf War, their precise number is elusive. Let's say they are many, very many. If one were to turn the homeless as if they were an organized group, a group with rights, a group you belonged to. If one weren't implicated in the common placeness of their existence, that is, if the homeless weren't such a present feature on the social horizon, one might find the distance to inquire as to why such a class exists at all in the United States. One might ask, what sort of poor, shitty country is it that has so little self-respect as to allow its citizens to sleep in doorways and beg for food? Questions like this don't get you very far. It's a matter of priorities. That's how it is. It's a free country. Both the rich and the poor have the right to sleep under bridges. Why don't they just go away? They're already away. They're home. They've been evicted. A word which, unlike homeless, speaks volumes. Homelessness grew exponentially in the United States. The general hardening of attitudes that followed in the 1960s, what Thomas Pinchone described as, the re-institution of fascism in America. In this country, it's hard to reconcile the larger segment of society, which is so ordinary and which would just like the homeless to disappear with the greatness of the country. They're reminded that, however great this country is, the homeless stand for the failure to face the future. Maybe forever homeless is the future. Maybe, how to assume quality is very good. What is striking about Hernandez's photographs of homeless sites is that they don't appear to romanticize, spectacularize, or exploit the inhabitants of these spaces. This is not simply because the bodies and faces of inhabitants don't appear. The power of these images lies in how they reveal the everydayness and humanity of living outside of the city. They reveal this through sensitivity, a particular kind of attention to humanity through material things. I discovered Hernandez's work only recently through a retrospective at SF MoMA, and was taken by the way his images resonate with the approach I have taken in thinking about an archaeology of the Albany Bulb. The archaeology of the Albany Bulb is a project of attention as well to a place in our own community where people have been both at home and evicted in the last handful of years. Anthropologist Robert Desjardins writes in his ethnography of a homeless shelter in Seattle that typically one knows the homeless not by talking with them, but by seeing them. He shares an account of the NYPD arresting 10 people in the subway one winter in the 1990s for appearing homeless. He offers a sensuous ethnographic account in the hopes of tempering the superficial treatment of people experiencing homelessness and homeless through stereotype and judgment, through seeing. Rather than vilifying the practice of looking, however, his caution reinforces the necessity for something like an archaeology of the Albany Bulb, which harnesses archaeological attention, largely a visual, but always multi-sensorial practice in order to know more sensitively the realities of homelessness. More than that, it also reinforces the power of representations of people experiencing homelessness. Desjardins also writes that to describe someone as homeless announces a lasting identity. Homelessness notes a temporary lack of housing, connotes a more lasting career. In considering the materiality of such a state, which is so often described as grabbing identity, archaeology of the Albany Bulb was an attempt to employ the conventional methods of archaeological attention, systematic survey, written, drawn, photographic documentation, in order to complicate the narratives that circulate about a group of displaced, disenfranchised people. Home is here, or it is not here. The question is not how, nor who, nor when, but where is your home? Home is located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar. It can be a wagon, a caravan, a boat, or a tent. So wrote British anthropologist Mary Douglas. Most famous for her term of phrase, there is matter out of place. She also called home a pattern of regular doings, emphasizing the process that makes home. That home is not really where the heart is, it is where the heart does, where it does the kinds of forgettable things that create the worn down spots that make a house a home. Snoozing the alarm, brushing our teeth, leaving for work, school, the store, caring for our pets, our children, our partners and friends. Reading and chatting and showering and thinking and fighting and making dinner. We evaluate others' houses based on what kinds of homes we think they might be and what kind of people might dwell within them. Our values, our assumptions about the right and wrong way to live are wrapped up in what we say counts as a house or a home. I would like to tell a story about home at a place called the Albany Vault. The story is not my own, however, and so I will tell it as I have come to know it. Through a deep attention to things and through the glimpses of life that I have been told by others, I aspire to filmmaker Trinh Minh Ha's idea of speaking alongside. Where voices are absent, I hope my telling opens up rather than fills up a space for them. Through this story, I will introduce the idea of an archeology of the contemporary, a practice which harnesses the observable traces of the recent past to, quote, make the familiar unfamiliar and to address the material realities of contemporary life. I am convinced that one of the most important stories of the Albany Vault is the story of homes. There are others, of course, of land and sea, of morphing urban fabric and shoreline, but at its core, the Albany Vault is built of homes. I'll start the story with bricks and I'll start the story at the turn of the 20th century where bricks were the building material de rigueur of the booming west coast of California. Los Angeles and San Francisco were the epicenter of a clay brick industry to rival your wildest dreams. The mass production of brick requires deep, pure clay sources that can be mined and the clay processed, molded and fired in kilns. These bricks were made by the stocked and enrichment brick companies. Stocked and fired, an old brick company was founded in 1907, supplying the barrier with bricks from a prolific clay source in Tesla, east of San Francisco off I-V-8 between what's now Livermore and Tracy. That very same year, the Los Angeles Press Brick Company opened in Northern California, satellite, to meet the high demand of red-braided paving bricks following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. This company would eventually be to be known as the Richmond Press Brick Company. Along with other smaller producers, these companies supplied rapidly rebuilding San Francisco in the ever-expanding communities in the East Bay with hundreds of thousands of bricks a year. A handbook to structural and industrial materials in California, also published in the OTS, said that the Richmond plant, just a mile west of the town of Richmond, made on average 30,000 bricks per day at a patent kiln of its own design in a holding capacity of 800,000 bricks. Using machines and kilns of patented and hotly competitive designs, these companies located on chore-adjacent industrial land turned out the raw material of homes, fireplaces, pathways, storefronts, and civic buildings for decades. The Stockton Brick Company closed in 1943 and the Richmond Brick Company closed in 1966. These bricks were made by those companies sometime between 1906 and 1943 slash 1966. And just by being bricks, they are part of the story of the transformation of the Bay Area of the dramatically changing material realities in the first half of the 1900s. But these are bricks out of place, as Mary Douglas would say. They are no longer part of the fireplace for which they were made. I can safely say fireplace because yellow bricks are generally firebricks manufactured to be better insulators and withstand higher direct temperatures than other bricks. I photographed these bricks on Albany Bowl, a peninsula landform between Point Isabel and the Golden Gate Field's face track on the city of Albany's Bay Shore. The bowl was so called because of the dramatic neck and bowl topography that was created by the dumping of construction debris into the bay as early as 1939. The construction of the right of way for the Santa Fe Railroad and the clearing of land for the Golden Gate racetrack to the south left piles of rubble with nowhere to go in the late 1930s and 1940s. By 1963, the city of Albany awarded a contract that allowed the disposal of construction debris at the site, ushering in two decades of ordered dumping of material from routine demolitions, as well as more significant clearing of the bar right of way through Albany and surrounding East Bay communities. Here's representing that. Subtype between 1963 and 1983, the bricks found their second home as part of the massive tons of debris we now call the Bowl. They lived out their first lives as part of the structural landscape of Albany and came to rest here amongst the traces of East Bay's industrious growth. But not for long. Once the dump at the Albany Bowl was decommissioned, the site became largely unregulated public space. Long after the dump was minimally capped, people from all over the East Bay discovered the joys of the Bowl's view and the riches of its bedrock, the materials of past homes and buildings, rhubarb, brick, concrete, stone, dog walkers, lovers, artists, ravers and trippers found a place amidst the landscape of familiar materials out of place, including the same non-native plant species found in local gardens, yet clipping got mixed in with construction debris. Most importantly to this story, many people began visiting the Bowl in the mid-80s, but some of them stayed. People started calling the place home. Community on the Bowl grew, encouraged by the lax policing of the city of Albany's node-camping ordinance and the wealth of raw building materials under foot. Homes and public spaces like an amphitheater and library sprouted up alongside an active artistic landscape of painting and graffiti, found object sculpture, humor, politics and mysticism. By 2014, more than 70 people lived more or less full-time on the Bowl. I've been told that over the nearly 30 years of occupation there, people camped and lived for days, weeks, months and years at a time. A handful of long-term residents hunkered down from up to 10 to 15 years. Longer than many of us in this room have ever lived in one home. In the summer of 2014, the city initiated aggressive legal action to remove all the residents of the Bowl. The $3,000 settlement was offered to residents in exchange for the dismantling and evacuation of their homes in a one-year stay-away order. Some residents took this deal, while others stood their ground in an attempt to fight the eviction. Ultimately, however, the city's attempts were successful and all former residents of the Bowl have moved on, taking as many of their belongings within as was possible. This is where the bricks come back in. Homes at the Bowl range from simple tent or tarp campsites to elaborate, ever-changing constructions. A multi-story wood-framed Bayview mansion belonging to Boxer Bob, shown here. A complex hole for the hobbit built amongst the roots of a tree. Amber's place with a series of different living spaces adorned with historic architectural ornaments scavenged from the Bowl itself. Stephanie's house, a tranquil, neat overlook with a carefully-tended garden. Mom and Bear's house, just about the amphitheater, where a salon-like atmosphere could take over at any moment. Any number of tents in the wide open field at the center of the Bowl. And Pat and Kerry's place. By the time I arrived at the Bowl in the fall of 2014, Pat and Kerry were gone. I know them through stories and the things they left behind at their home on the south end of the Bowl. From what I gather, Pat and Kerry were long-term residents of the Bowl and lived there for years. They were living together in 2011 when Pat was diagnosed with congenital heart failure and was told he had six months to live. Despite stints in the hospital, he returned to the Bowl and lived there for two more years, even inviting Hostess Kerr to his place on the Bowl once or twice. He lived out the last of his time as a land fillian in this home with Kerry and spent most days in a lazy boy's recliner, according to his friend and Bowl resident, Amber Whitson. After he passed in October, 2013, a group of friends constructed a memorial message in an area known as the Brickyard, just above Pat and Kerry's place that read, we love you, Pat. The Brick Memorial to Pat was a fitting one because one of the striking features of his and Kerry's home was a meticulously laid brick floor, made of yellow and red bricks, made by the historic Richmond and Stockton companies of the early and mid 1900s. This 21st century floor puts matter back in place. Under the tall canopy of the tree at the center of their home, the floor was surrounded by burned earth and was, as I've been told, protected by a combination of salvaged wood and tarps. A glazed ceramic decorative molding was still resting on the floor when I first visited the perfect side table. A switchback path and a brick stairway led to a second living platform on the embankment above. Across from the brick floor, a large open space also protected by the tree canopy was surrounded by brick lined garden beds containing tended plants and chinkets. The floor was one of Pat's last projects and you can feel the labor of love just by looking at each brick and you can feel the perfectly aligned head to foot. Even more so when you stand on it and realize it's a masterfully level platform that is now weathered two years uncovered. I became aware of the Albany Bulg shortly after the evictions were complete and was invited to join a project called the Atlas of the Albany Bulg. Whose goal was to document in a number of different ways the experiences on and the state of the Bulg before development projects began. Atlas organizers Susan Moffitt had been in touch with a number of the Bulg's residents and had started a project to control histories providing the residents with disposable cameras to document their homes and doing walkthroughs to locate as many house and public sites as possible. After a visit to the Bulg with residents and activists and friend of Katz, Amber Whitson pictured here, we all decided that an archeology of the Albany Bulg might be an interesting way to continue this project now that most residents have been evicted and many had stay-away orders. Amber herself had rejected the $3,000 settlement and is still dealing with suits against her by the city but did not have a stay-away order. For the next eight weekends, myself and a group of student volunteers including Berkeley graduate students, Alyssa Scott, Mario Castillo, Katie Kingkopf, Scott Lyons, Wolfgang Alders and Mike Grown continued the survey of home sites and used traditional archeological methods to document what was left of the homes. Spending hours at each site, attending carefully to every left behind object and construction, photographing, mapping and describing the pattern of regular doings that undeniably marks these places as homes. Using a map made by a former resident and a landscape architecture student that marks general areas for home sites and public spaces, we relocated as many home sites on the southern half of Bulg as we could. We identified homes that had been occupied by known residents and for significant periods of time and selected four for detailed sketch mapping and survey. Other sites were documented on a short form and a two-by-two meter test surface unit was inventoried. I never knew Pat, but according to his Facebook page, he considered himself an urban archeologist as does Amber Whitson, who record figures in the community at the moment and added collectors, scrapers and thinkers of material found at the edges of city life. Amber at least knew very well about the deep history of the materials that made up the boat, the deep history of the materials that made up the boat could tell. When she gave me a tour of her camp, she quizzed me on collections of historic marble and steel and uniquely stamped bricks and ceramics. The landscape and history of the boat invite this kind of inquiry. The boat itself is a human artifact that tells of many years of Albany's history. If we understand archeology to be the study of the relationship between people, places and things, following Bill Rathje, then in archeology of the contemporary, like the one we undertook at the Albany bulb, is a practice of paying attention to the formation of the past in the present. A slow and deliberate consideration of people's stories about a place, the things they leave behind and the way histories layer themselves on the landscape. Some have taken issue with calling this work archeology, questioning the pastness of the people who once lived there, but now still living have been forced to live somewhere else. Harrison and Schofield discuss the idea of this contemporary pastness as one that exists within living memory, often including the current generation and one immediately before and after. This definition of the past creates a moving target, which I argue is appropriate for the treatment of something like the heritage of the homeless, where tasks to be perceived as imminent within the present. Most importantly, Harrison and Schofield highlighted the normalizing feature of this contemporary past, and I quote, archeological sites of the contemporary past are places that in some ways we know all about, that in others can seem almost as mysterious and distant as sites of prehistory of the medieval period, end quote. While this verges on the romantic, it is exactly the power of unfamiliarizing that has been the most powerful in the work of the apathy Albany poem. Our hope is that the documentation we created can be used in creative ways to capitalize on the authority of science and the language of heritage. The kinds of descriptions, forms, photos, and maps produced by our work are yet another way the vault comes to be known as a place. Already known through the experience of living there, of making it a home, or through visiting it and interacting with it as a landscape for contemplation, recreation, and art being. You could situate the archeology of the Albany Bowl as part of a small collection of projects calling themselves the archeology of homelessness, but the hominess of life at the bowl challenges this. While it is most certainly a document of the lives of people experiencing homelessness, my hope and those of our landfilling collaborators is that further work can make the information useful to researchers and institutions advocating for the rights of those disenfranchised in living outside. It also, however, represents a heritage project in preserving the history of creativity and perseverance at the bowl, a better option for some of that even supportive housing. But now we've evicted residents of the Albany Bowl who lived there for any number of reasons and had any number of relationships to being called homeless. Attention to the bowl was a place of homes, a place of fullness rather than one of lacking, a place of attention and ingenuity rather than discard and disuse. Challenge is how we judge the experience of homelessness. Many residents of the bowl consider themselves housed, consider themselves lucky in some respects to be living on Bayshore land, largely safer than under highway overpasses and abandoned doorways. While life in the landfill was not without hardship, some of them loved the bowl and they felt more at home there than anywhere else. Unfortunately, it is too late to prevent the eviction of residents from the bowl. And now, as bulldozing has begun, too late to preserve the landform and all its junkyard glory. But it is never too late to share the stories of home that happened here and search for better ways to support the folks in our midst who struggle to find or keep their homes. In light of today's strike, it is important too to note the particular experience of women experiencing homelessness. As some of the project's key collaborators, the women at the bowl built unique networks of support with and without male partners and were some of the most vocal protectors of the bowl. Nationally, however, women and families are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population with 34% of the total homeless population composed of families. Of these homeless families, 84% are headed by women. African-American families are disproportionately represented among the homeless population, making up 48% of homeless families. Domestic and sexual violence is the leading cause of homelessness for women and families and 20 to 50% of all homeless women and children become homeless as a direct result of fleeing domestic violence. Homeless women are far more likely to experience violence of all sorts compared to women or not homeless because of a lack of personal security when living outdoors or in shelters. Domestic violence shelter provides, providers are prohibited from reporting client information, therefore estimates likely undercount the number of homeless women and families seeking shelter as a result of domestic violence. Age and sexual orientation also affect one's experience of homelessness. Many adolescents become homeless after leaving home because of conflicts with parents regarding sexual orientation. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or youth questioning their sexual orientation represent 20% of homeless youth. 62% of homeless, gay and transgender youth will attempt suicide. Among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons who experience domestic violence, 57% became homeless as a result of domestic violence. I'll end with the words of the residents themselves. From an anonymous open letter painted on three large slabs of concrete on the southern shore of the bulb just months before the evictions. Whoa. This landfill is made from the shattered remnants of buildings and structures that not so long ago were whole and standing, framed in concrete and steel, expected and intended to last. Now through the concrete, the grasses make their way. Eucalyptus, acacia, and palm trees drive their roots down through the cracks. Waves constantly erode the shoreline and wash out the edge of the road. And here and there, in sections leveled and cleared of rebar, our tents are hidden away. We live around and with and in the rubble. Live, not merely survive. Can you see how hopeful this is? The bulb is not utopia. It is not free from strife and chaos and cruelty. But either is anywhere else. It is flawed, but it isn't broken and it shouldn't be treated that way. We too are flawed, but we are not broken. So when the politicians start asking their questions and making their decisions, you can help ensure that we are not treated that way.