ROY presents: Mona Gazala
Disinvestment
“Disinvestment is the first wave of colonial violence.” Or as a friend of mine suggested, “capitalists create desolation, and call it opportunity.”
These photography works are interior views of the vacant house next door to where I live in Franklinton. The last known resident, Lola Purdy, lived here decades ago, and nothing remains now but an empty shell, sold and resold recently as the speculative market in Franklinton heats up. But the house remains devoid of life, serving a suburban investor instead of providing a space for home or community. These images capture the residual presence in a place that once was home.
As the stability of home or even of homeland is of personal significance to me, my works grapple with both the personal and the structural nature of that instability. What situations such as gentrification do we label “inevitable” when they are really driven by political and personal decisions?
We as a city think of urban planning and city government as working for the “common good,” but the common good is highly subjective. City planning (as Oren Yiftachel wrote about extensively) has a darker side; the ability to be used as a tool of racial and economic oppression. Withholding funding from neighborhoods so that they are crippled and crumbling…later to be revived, not for the empowerment of the original inhabitants but for an influx of those already empowered.
Articles of that “dark side” make their way into my work; a redlined map, a porch post from a demolished house in a Black neighborhood, or a cold call from moneyed strangers…
ROY asks
What is your name and preferred pronouns?
Mona Gazala (she/her)
How has art (whether it be your own or art in general) changed you?
Art gives me a voice. Art is the articulation of my truths when I am otherwise silenced.
How did you start your artistic practice?
Like many artists, the urge to create was always with me. It began with an urge to re-create what was beautiful around me, and as I got older it became a way to peel back what was ugly so that it could be transformed.
When a first-time viewer sees your work, what is the first word that you hope they think when looking at it?
Provocative.