La Cuesta: Worlding a Sidewalk

Co-directed with Álvaro Torres Crespo

(2013 / 15 min)


The places we notice in passing are sites where social hierarchies manifest and interact. In the realm of the visible, only some people are able to remain unseen, to choose whom to see and when. Aesthetics is not about how the world is presented to us but rather how it is pre-established for us; what Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.” What would emerge if we explored an ordinary stretch of sidewalk in the East Side of Austin, Texas, for a period of several months? How and by whom would we be challenged aesthetically and politically? LA CUESTA evokes a place on the side of the road and the lives that sustain it. It is a sensory ethnography, a confrontation, and a poem.

Using Format