A promotional image for TurkxTaylor exhibition “Transition Times Part II Reconfiguring Structures of Power at Turk and Taylor” at CounterPulse May 1 to August 25, 2024. “Within an artfully rendered deconstructed building, nature grows on dilapidated walls and abandoned floors as sunlight shines through a gaping hole in the ceiling, exposing a cloudy sunset”

Transition Times Part II: Re-configuring Structures of Power is a continuation of the TurkxTaylor Initiative’s effort to collectively imagine ways to dismantle and reconfigure structures of power. The work presented reconfigures the building at the corner of Turk and Taylor Streets, which was the landmark site of Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, a queer grassroots uprising against police violence in August 1966. The exhibition highlights the building’s current use as a “halfway house” operated by private prison company GEO Group and serves as a call to action to liberate this historical queer and trans site.

To disentangle the idea of structural reconfiguration, this exhibition explores how mechanisms of power manifest in the building and the neighborhood. To counter those mechanisms, we consider ways of local resistance that inspire us to propose alternative ways of relating. We aim to translate these alternative ways of relating by reconfiguring the mechanisms of power through using the structure of the building itself. The exercise is not about architectural design specifically, but about speculative exploration, where there are no limits or constraints. We are working with abstract space, in the void of what can be. This is a utopian exercise to conjure new realities and make space for the broadest vision of justice possible. 

The exhibitions’ title references performance artist Julian Carter’s article “Embracing Transition, or Dancing in the Folds of Time” in which he explains how gender transition, as an embodied experience, is related to the technical vocabulary in dance when referring to transitional movements in spacetime. Transitions, as physical strategies, join time and space in ways that consider an embodied relationality that involves movement and change. Transitional time and space relate to the way queer temporality folds back towards the past body that no longer exists while propelling society forward toward an embodied future. As we re-member Compton’s Cafeteria Riot as a pivotal time of anticarceral resistance in the Tenderloin, we perceive the present as another transitional time where we can build a robust coalition to collectively reconfigure structures of power and transition to an alternative future for the historical building.

RSVP to the Opening Reception: Thursday, June 6th, 2024, 5-7PM

On Saturday, August 24, 2024 , TxT co-curators Emji Saint Spero and Leila Weefur close out this exhibition with a presentation of 

Compton’s Celebration: Trans Temporal Resistances

Come see the exhibition at one of our shows or email zoe@counterpulse.org to coordinate a viewing time.

About TurkxTaylor Initiative (TxT)

The TurkxTaylor Initiative (TxT) is an open assemblage formed by autonomous individuals without traditional leadership. Our mission is to liberate the landmark building at 101-121 Taylor Street in the Tenderloin, the historic site of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot of 1966, currently owned and operated as a halfway house by the private prison company GEO Group. We are interested in physically and symbolically re-envisioning the legendary queer and trans site and ultimately creating a just future for the historic structure. We use a collaborative decision-making process to share power and responsibility based on mutual trust.

You should come see this exhibition if you are a fan of trans liberation!

Collaborating Artists:

TxT artists

Helen Bronston is a transgender woman, architect, photographer, historian, teacher, and artist. She is an Associate with SmithGroup in San Francisco, a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, and an instructor in Architectural Theory at Academy of Art University. Helen received her Masters in Architecture from Harvard, her Bachelor’s in Anthropology from Yale, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Germany. Architecture from this trans woman’s brain lives in the public sphere across the USA, from Boston to Long Beach, from Seattle to San Francisco, from Richmond and Oakland to Philadelphia.

Spencer Bundoc (they/he) is an artist who received their Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture at UC Berkeley. Their work in architecture centers the life and death of queer spaces, the histories of these spaces, and architecture’s connection with the human body’s position in different axes of power. As an artist, they are primarily a painter, but they love to experiment with film, crochet, digital art and animation, screen printing, soundscapes, and fashion.

Isabella Torres: Architect and Latina Transgender woman who graduated in Colombia in 1987 and specialized in Urban & Environmental Management. After her graduation, she worked for the government as an Architect Specialist in Urban Environments on the construction of housing, schools, and other infrastructure projects such as a Military Base and Republic Bank. Since 2017, she has been protected and in asylum here in San Francisco due to political persecution, as a union leader, and defender of human rights of the transgender community in her country. Now she is a member of the Carpenters Union in SF and is currently studying Construction Management at City College.

Ellen (she/her/theirs) is a semiotics junkie. a degenerate mestiza. She eats. She is filled. She bioaccumulates. She is a filter. She steals to stay alive. a Vulture, Weasel, Hyenna, Parasite.She will be referred to as “parasite”. para : feeding beside. para :: site… taking from what you have not nurtured or cultivated. All are parasites to mother. parasitos: one who lives at another’s expense, who eats at the table of another earning his welcome through flattery.

Chandra Laborde (she/her) is a queer buddhist architect working at the intersection of gender, ecology, justice, and the built environment. Born and raised in Mexico City, she studied architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She fell in love with the Bay while studying a Master’s in Advanced Architectural Design at the California College of the Arts. She then lived in Tijuana, where she worked in ecological construction and permaculture. Chandra is currently a doctoral candidate in Architecture in the History, Theory, and Society Program at UC Berkeley, where she studies radical ecological communes in Northern California during the 1970s.

Exhibition Curators: Chandra Laborde and X Vazquez

X Vazquez (they/she) is an artist, activist, and undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. As a co-curator, X worked alongside Chandra in organizing and realizing TxT’s vision for this exhibit. Although they do not have work featured, this is X’s curatorial debut, learning first-hand the demands and timeline of a curator-in-residence. X hopes to eventually show her work in galleries, embodying archives through avant-garde drag, emphasizing the past and present within imagining liberated QTBIPOC futurities.

Featured Image: Image created in collaboration between Chandra Laborde, Ari Bible and Fiona Kaech. A promotional image for TurkxTaylor exhibition “Transition Times Part II Reconfiguring Structures of Power at Turk and Taylor” at CounterPulse May 1 to August 25, 2024. “Within an artfully rendered deconstructed building, nature grows on dilapidated walls and abandoned floors as sunlight shines through a gaping hole in the ceiling, exposing a cloudy sunset”

The exhibition is produced with generous support from the Graham Foundation, the Joan E. Draper Architectural History Fund from the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the Curator in Residence Program at the CounterPulse.

Past artists presented in the CounterPulse gallery: