FRONTIER - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Materials Scientist, a Professor
Deb Chachra is a materials scientist, a professor of engineering, and a writer. I've followed her writing and her on social media for the better part of a decade, reading with admiration as she uses her scientific expertise as a basis for comments on the culture of technology-and on North American society more generally. Those who have followed Frontier Magazine from the beginning will recognize her name because I quoted her in my introductory editor's letter.
I find Chachra's work so appealing not least because she has steadfastly insisted that we can and should do more to care for each other. She makes this argument by discussing infrastructure-the frequently invisible collective systems that enable us to do what we do. These systems demonstrate what she called, in a 2021 essay, "care at scale." Now she has gathered that line of thinking in a beautiful, persuasive, heartening new book, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. It's coming out tomorrow and, as you can imagine, I highly recommend it.
You can learn more about Frontier Magazine and subscribe at magazine.frontier.is. Thanks for listening. Now, to give you a sense of what you'll encounter in How Infrastructure Works, here's my conversation with Deb Chachra.
Helen Cammock was our first artist in residence in New Orleans, and we will present her work in October, her first North American film commission, at an hour and fifty-seven minutes. We will show that work, which is a kind of long-form, steady portrait of many different artists and culture workers in this community. I think we were all, including Helen, quite surprised by the final cut of the film, how many minutes it was. It was longer than her Turner Prize film, longer than the Max Mara film. And then you watched the film and you thought, "Oh, it had to be the longest one because the duration of that film was a registration of her respect for the people she was listening to." These were not tight edits or cuts. This was affording an artist to take as long as they needed to take to tell their story. And there is a kind of tempo to that film that feels like affection, but also really just deep respect for the community that she spent time in. People gave her time and she gave it back.
This will be her fourth long stretch in the city. And in many ways, she also doesn't need us as a kind of interloper anymore. She has her own relationship to this place. And she's established her own questions and positions on things. And I think that is something that we really want to foster when artists are here. Yet we want to welcome you and provide hospitality and make introductions. At the end of the day, we want this to be a place that you establish your own quiet relationship to, on whatever terms that is.
BS: So you've spoken eloquently about Helen Cammock and Alia Farid and artists that have come from elsewhere to New Orleans. And I wonder if you can just tell us a little bit about the artist Tina Girouard and about the exhibition and the publication that you're working on around her work. And then also about how her work ties into this home that you mentioned earlier in the conversation.
AA: Tina Girouard is an artist who was born in Acadiana, Louisiana, in Cajun country near Lafayette, and who moved from Louisiana in the late 1960s to New York. She was a co-founder of some of the most important art spaces for downtown Manhattan, involved in 112 Greene Street, was a participant in [the] Anarchitecture group, co-founder of Food, the restaurant, in SoHo. She premiered many of her early works at The Kitchen, and participated in the first show at PS1 with her gorgeous installation Rooms. She was at the vanguard of that moment and I think enormously shaped that time and most people have never heard of her.