Emeraldtown: Gary, Indiana
Keg de Souza & Zanny Begg: You Are Here

ReMake Estate deliberately evokes Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, an unrealised project for which Matta-Clark bought up ‘gutterspace’, cheap unusable slivers of land sliced from New York’s city grid through anomalies in surveying and zoning. He collected their maps, deeds, and other bureaucratic documentation and planned to use them as sites for his ‘anarchitectural’ interventions, but died before the project was ever completed. In the period of near-endemic recession and ‘white flight’ that has plagued America’s Midwest since the 1970s, these ‘gutterspaces’ have morphed into entire towns, like Gary, Indiana, the birthplace of Michael Jackson and famous siblings, now full of abandoned houses and disused space.

In the Northern summer of 2010, Sydney artist collective You Are Here undertook a residency that involved transforming an abandoned house in Gary into a mural, meeting place and edible garden. In the process of making ReMake Estate, their engagement with the local community and their attempts to understand the town’s relationship with its most famous son coalesced strangely in the visions of black affluence portrayed in the 1978 Wizard of Oz musical parody The Wiz, in which Jackson played the role of the Scarecrow. Drawing these elements together, Emeraldtown, the work on which You Are Here’s Artspace project centres, is the document of this process, a filmic portrait of the town of Gary and its residents.