Touchable Stories: Fort Point, South Boston

Since 1997, the Touchable Stories artist group has been producing interactive art installations describing neighborhood concerns in the Boston area. For the 2001-2002 project, the group focused its artistic lens on itself by looking at the issues facing the artist community of Fort Point. In the November 2001 episode, Greater Boston Arts spoke with founder and director Shannon Flattery about the group's artistic process and goals. Below are excerpts from this interview and images of the installation.

Shannon Flattery in South Boston's Fort Point neighborhood.

Touchable Stories is a combination of oral history and interactive exhibits. Our goal is to get communities heard, communities that aren't heard from very often, usually the working class communities. In combining oral history - which is in and of itself very powerful - with a really dynamic art form, the effect is a powerful advocacy tool.

We take ten issues or ten themes from any given community and use them in an exhibit as a portrait. The community really has to decide what those ten themes or issues are going to be. If we're putting together a portrait of you, what needs to be part of it? What's really essential?

Each of the artists in the group takes on one of these themes and builds an interactive exhibit around it. So you have roughly ten or twelve artists building different rooms that are all connected to each other that become a walk-through maze. Each of the rooms is narrated by a voiceover taken from the oral histories. So you're hearing the history of the neighborhood from the neighborhood. All the artists are doing is creating a setting, a setting that is interesting for interaction.

In the "Mentors" room by Laura DiMeo and Shannon Flattery, automatic sensors trigger audio and video stories of artists describing influential people and moments in their careers.

My father would always ask, "How do you explain what installation art is?" And I said, "Well, you could take a really abstract painting or Dali's Persistence of Memory with all those melted clocks and make it room-sized or barn-sized and walk through it. That would be an installation." That's the best way I can think of it. I mean, I can put people underwater. I can make them think that they're walking through fire. I can put them in a forest, whatever is necessary in order to get their attention.

We chose neighborhoods that you don't hear from, that aren't really part of the civic dialogue, and that are usually very stereotyped. Any time I hear about a stereotyped community I imagine that there's a lot to it - so I go in and find out what it's about. We've been in three different communities - Allston, Central Square, and Dorchester. We're currently in Fort Point. Fort Point is the largest artist community in New England. It's basically people who don't make a lot of money and who don't have a lot of political pull.

Fort Point is the neighborhood I've been in for 12 years. One of the things I've been able to do for these other communities is really come from the outside in and not have any preconceived ideas about anything. So what scared me the most is that I had been here for so long and I knew so much of the story that I would have a really hard time pulling back and being objective.

Even though the majority of time in the exhibit is spent on the artist culture that is being threatened, the piece is about Fort Point and starts with its early history when it was just tidal marshland and works its way up into the present.

Amejo Amyot's and Shannon Flattery's "History" room includes historical and contemporary photographs of Fort Point buildings juxtaposed side-by-side in jars filled with water.

Fort Point was originally tidal land and was filled in. This part of it was mostly filled in by the Boston Wharf Company that's been here since, I think, 1836, and with the help of the state, built up this area because they were trying to control the waterways.

This was a real wharf area. It originally stored molasses and sugar and rum and all those kinds of things. Eventually the industry shifted and they were no longer making the kind of money off of warehousing sugar and molasses. So they started actually building warehouses mostly for the wool industry.

It was the building of the Summer Street and Congress Street bridges that really brought everyone in. Summer Street was really known as Wool Row, all the way down to Southie. This was a hopping wool industry. People really don't understand how central Boston was to the wool industry and the world. It was one of the biggest wool ports in the world.

Then, around the 50s and 60s, for a lot of different reasons, industry went south, including the textile industry. So a lot of the wool industry started leaving in the 50s and 60s. The introduction of polyester really did a number on the wool industry. Then the artists showed up in the early 70s.

What's happening right now is we have the new waterfront three blocks to one side. We have a 60 acre convention center three blocks to another side. We've got a developer who's bought another whole side and is developing that into an office park. So the artists used to take up much more space down here. And slowly what's happening is the change is coming further and further in until there's basically this nucleus of us now surrounded by offices. And we're fighting like hell to hold onto that.

In the "Turnscope" room visitors can delve into a bin of Buckwheat husks to find hidden images illustrating the neighborhood's recent gentrification.

We're watching buildings going down daily. I've heard reports that that people in the North End have been dropping from nervous exhaustion because the Big Dig noise is just horrendous and it's 24 hours a day. But the artists in this neighborhood - I mean, people are painting it; I think people are starting to do rhythmic work because of the pole drivers and people are just really excited by the refuse that's being created.

It's interesting talking to the artists down here because they're considering right now, scary as it is, one of the most exciting times to be here. People are producing. Three years ago, you could walk down the street and even though you knew everybody, you didn't always have to say hi because one of the things about being an artist is being in your own world a lot of the time. But now everyone's really hanging out together. Everyone's really talking. Everyone's really trying to figure out how to hold on.

In Anne Lilly's "Dreams" room visitors listen on headphones to community members describe a range of dreams - from anxiety about eviction to appreciation of the neighborhood's beauty.

It's funny because I thought the focus of this installation was going to be on the value of creativity in our culture. I think it is; it definitely is part of the dialogue. But the real crux in this neighborhood came down to the fact that the biggest kind of stereotype - what we actually had to confront - was the idea that artists are lazy. The idea that they do art in their spare time; that it is a hobby. So one woman said, "If you can show people that we have to do what we're doing, that we're not doing this because it's a lifestyle or it's funky, then you'll have done an incredible thing for the neighborhood."

In a departure of form from the other artist-created rooms in the exhibit, "The Studio" is a complete reassembly of painter and illustrator Frances Pardy's workspace.

When people leave here I hope that they understand why arts and artists are valuable to this culture and why they should be helping to advocate to hold onto them.