As an undergrad in college I received a scholarship to travel around the country documenting suburban and post-industrial wastelands. Years later, after several moves and traversing both coasts, I enrolled in graduate school and on my commute found myself passing by one of the sites I had photographed years earlier. I began revisiting the site, and over several years watched it transform and decline from a Grand Union grocery store, to a Salvation Army, and then finally falling vacant, weeds and vines pushing through the cracks in the pavement and overtaking the windows and crumbling bricks.
In this video performance I move across the abandoned shopping plaza parking lot with a large handmade white flag, bold and defiant, yet performing an act of surrender to the economic and industrial machine that created the site, the environment that reclaims it, and the failure of my own agency and subjectivity within it. Flagging captures the change in meaning that happens once a space has been transformed via the act of performance and documentation, and the way a history, or a love of a site can alter its significance.