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Visualizing Gilman is a social design project that engages participants in critical forms of place-based identity through the collaborative activation of photographic archives, maps, and ethnographic methods.

The project seeks contributions from Gilman community members through facilitated workshops that encourage active contribution to the past, present, and future of 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, CA.

ABOUT 924 Gilman

924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, CA, deemed Gilman, exists as an anti-discriminatory, all ages site of music experimentation, autonomously organized by punk youth communities. Gilman has withstood the Bay Area swell of gentrification for 36 years, ever in a state of becoming. What contributes to Gilman’s resiliency when so many cultural community projects dissolve into the folds of social and spatial redevelopment agendas? What design tools support vulnerable cultural sites in countering the impacts of gentrification? This project adapts critical design and subverts archival practice to contend with these questions. It activates a photographic archive, along with maps and surveys, to explore a mixed method approach to place-based identity. Gilman’s stakeholders have co-created these new visual forms, looking critically at the past, present and future to bolster their heritage. In the participants hands, these materials serve as symbolic proof of a galvanized legacy that counters encroaching hegemonic interest.

About the Murray Bowles Photographic Archive

Murray Bowles devoted nearly forty years documenting and participating in the Northern California punk and hardcore music scene. For those involved in the scene, his presence and commitment to the San Francisco and East Bay Punk movements of the 1980's and 1990's was legendary. Murray continued documenting in pure pursuit of the no-label scene, the obscure bar or backyard show, until his unexpected passing in 2019. His legacy extends well beyond the 80,000 Kodak Tri-X film negatives he left behind, having significant impact on the professional and personal development of countless punk bands, musicians, writers, gigs, and fans across Northern California. His selfless instinct to capture a culture in the making places him in the highest regard as a chronicler of counter-culture youth. His pursuit was nothing short of relentless.