What gives a place cultural significance? How does a place of cultural significance become publicly recognized? What happens as a result?
Undisclosed Locations is a series of interactive papercraft posters asking these questions of the Chicago populace. I frame these questions by asking the person on the street to consider the cultural significance of underground electronic music venues in Chicago.
Basements, warehouses and living rooms are used as supporting architecture for the throwing of clandestine music parties in the city. These spaces are often very mundane looking from the outside in order to prevent bringing attention to the event. A person might walk by one of these non-descript warehouses or apartments and think nothing of it. For some though, these places are where personal relationships are born and die, groundbreaking electronic music is performed, and personal transformative events occur.
These places fade away. Police visits unnerve the tenants. Landlords intervene. Gentrification encroaches. After the space has ceased holding events, I place an Undisclosed Location poster outside of it. This poster then gives the person on the street a small taste of the events held inside this nondescript building and asks a question of the viewer "What is something you own that could make people's lives better?"
Undisclosed Locations #1 focuses on 3339 W. Beach Ave. - a house in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago.
