“A disturbing and darkly funny aperture into the South, framing Floridian Suburbs as the new frontier and its people as living documents of its Colonial history and segregationist policies. What he chronicles is unnerving, amusing, endearing, repugnant, hilarious, and alarming a stupid, grinning shadow of Americana, against which anyone would want to lock their doors and windows.” “Ryan Rivas is a documentarian, a silent lurker in the evenly mowed grass of Colonialtown, a neighborhood as much haunted by its history as your own. So, make sure to ‘get your guns and ammo’ ready!” You will never quite view your ‘nice’ neighbors the same. Seemingly facile in its mission, this project is smart, bold and successful.
Nextdoor in Colonialtown, however, lets those communities speak for themselves. “There is something to be said about people who lock themselves away in their ‘nice communities,’ desperately trying to separate themselves from ‘worse ones.’ Indeed, there’s been much scholarship on white flight and its cousin, gentrification. – Teresa Carmody, author of The Reconception of Marie In other words, maybe the unsettling fact of Florida is that what happens here, happens across the United States.”
In the afterword, Rivas offers a succinct account of suburbia as the continued legacy of white settler colonialism, including federal laws and initiatives which, taken up and taken advantage of at the local level, made it so. Note the fragility, the shadows, the lawn objects, the white fright. “In this brilliant and often humorous image-text assemblage, what emerges is an uncanny echo of specters and calls: for policing, firearms, and hot tub recommendations to see “we are all humans with the same organs” and to watch out for some suspicious creature doing some kind of harm. Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace " Nextdoor in Colonialtown is by turns a documentary on the personal and collective, a treatise on loneliness, a dark comedy of manners, and an extraordinary examination of what it means to live in America." Note: The limited-edition hardcover of this title has sold out this book is now a paperback. By displacing his familiar surroundings, Rivas evokes the broader White imaginary underlying colonialism and suburbanization. The result is at turns absurd and abject, goofy and gothic, paranoid and profound. In Nextdoor in Colonialtown, he pairs photos of the neighborhood with conversations assembled from the area’s posts. Ryan Rivas has lived in Orlando’s Colonialtown North neighborhood for over a decade.
0 kommentar(er)
