Who Be We (2015)
Who Be We (2015) was a language-driven installation, intervention, and urban exploration of the socioeconomic politics and poetics of place and ownership. Executed in a historically African American neighborhood in West Philadelphia along Lancaster Avenue as a collaboration between Charles Hall, Gina DeCagna, and Stephanie Elden in 2015, Who Be We mocked the neighborhood's ubiquitous yet unwarranted neon-yellow "We Buy Houses" advertisement signs on telephone poles targeting low-income owners. Appropriating Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "We Real Cool," new signs were placed with a phone number for residents to call and vocalize their feelings of discomfort regarding displacement, infestation, and unaccountability.
