Terrain Vague

Terrain Vague is a 16mm photo-roman, based on the images and accompanying log of a fictional female researcher who, over the summer of 2016, chronicles the development of a new private university-based innovation center from the shell of a former coatings laboratory in a poor and working class Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood. Through her investigation into the innovation center’s raison d’etre--and thus the history and geography surrounding it--the researcher reflects on the endless cycles of “creative destruction” that undergird this development, and the entrepreneurial science fictions and urban nostrums that fuel such cycles.

Year

2020

Director

Edward Kihn

Duration

47 min

Country

United States