Demos, c3 initiative, Portland, OR

collaborative multi-part artwork, video, community round-table, gallery exhibition, publications

ERNEST is Amanda Curreri, Welly Fletcher, Hannah Ireland, and George Pfau

Over the course of 2013-2015, ERNEST produced a group of multi-media artworks investigating an unoccupied jail site called Wapato in the St. John’s neighborhood of Portland. The project, Demos: Wapato Correctional Facility is comprised of a video, publication, a print edition (printed in collaboration with Pacific Northwest College of Arts' Watershed Press), and a participatory event called Wapato Roundtable. This work was made with the tremendous support of Portland’s c3:Initiative. 

Demos (pronounced “day-moss”) conjures early Athenian concepts of both “village” and “People” (Δῆμος). Equally, demos can be read to connote more modern concepts of the “demo,” or mix-tape, as well as the shorthand vernacular for demolition. As a collaborative group intent on testing and enacting forms of democracy, demos refers to local participatory engagement, keeping methods experimental and provisional, while harnessing the power of generative de(con)struction.

Coyotes, ERNEST’s unlikely interlocutors at Wapato, burrow beneath the fenced perimeter of the jail to come and go as they please. Coyote, and an unrelenting sense of frustration, leads Demos: Wapato Correctional Facility in a transformation of the specifics of Wapato Jail into a platform for challenging conversation and collaboration. The video component acts as conjurer, the publication as a platform for voices ranging in depth and breadth, and the event component creates an opportunity to stimulate discussion around the issues it brings up for various members of the community.

Demos: Wapato Correctional Facility, Video, 16 minutes 21 seconds