Skywatchers' films explore life, art, and resistance in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, illuminating the power of art to foster belonging, reveal hidden truths, and reclaim space for justice and community.
Looking back over 10 years of Skywatchers’ relational, durational art making, this documentary illuminates this pioneering community arts program deeply embedded in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. Engendering a growing sense of belonging among its ensemble and deep partnership throughout the Tenderloin, Skywatchers has made boundary breaking multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary performance works in service of celebration, interrogation, disruption, social justice, and community wide transformation.
Skywatchers original documentary, Reimagining The City as Our Own, exposes the practice of policing public space using hostile design elements in the Tenderloin. Unpleasant design, sometimes called hostile architecture, is intentionally designed to be unwelcoming, unusable, or uncomfortable. It aims to discourage people from using public space in ways some consider undesirable: loitering, sleeping, gathering. These design elements target unhoused and poor people, discouraging those who are marginally housed or unhoused from occupying or using public space for their own needs. Plantings, slopes, spikes, sprinklers, lights, sounds, and benches with dividers, are all examples of unpleasant design. By placing the bodies of the Skywatchers ensemble in these spaces, we hope to shed light on this silent form of discrimination, and encourage the imagining and reclaiming of public space.
Inside Hotel Iroquois is a guided, walking meditation and interactive experience that invites audiences to witness first hand what life is like inside supportive housing. Hotel Iroquois is a historic hotel and current SRO/ supportive housing site in the Tenderloin. In Inside Hotel Iroquois, residents will welcome you into their homes, sharing stories both ordinary and surprising, human and heroic.
