Prior Occupants

Alison Nguyen’s upcoming film will trace the less known nuclear history embedded in the High Line and the Westbeth Artist Community (formerly Bell Labs), where critical cinema, telecommunication, and military technologies, including components later used in the atomic bomb, were researched. Using architectural photographs from early site visits of Bell Labs' former facility as a departure point, Nguyen explores what material and cultural histories persist within sites of adaptive reuse, and which histories are obscured or erased. In an assemblage of audiovisual material including sculpturally re-filmed archival documents, performance sequences, and layered fragments of audio interviews with residents and architects who have shaped Wesbeth and the surrounding High Line Park, the film explores individual and collective relationships to place, technological development, and mortality. The work foregrounds the ways in which the structures of the past quietly haunt urban landscapes of the future-present.