This project exists in the context of historical and modern systems of oppression, evoking both de facto and de jure segregation, nationally and in St. Louis.

An Archive of Boundaries explores the imagined boundaries and divides that after drawn leave a very real impact, specifically looking at the process in St. Louis. During the New Deal, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created to assist people who defaulted on mortgages and those undergoing foreclosures. To decide who banks should give loans to, agents traveled around the country giving each residential area a property value, starting a practice known now as redlining (creating areas that are deemed unstable because of economic, racial, and physical deterioration; banks would not give loans in these areas). However, due to their nonchalant process of redlining, communities (often times the ones, which needed it the most) were left without assistance for decades. These lines drawn by real estate agents encouraged further de facto segregation of race and class, and left complete neighborhoods unheard and forgotten. The HOLC Map of St. Louis is featured in the gallery above. The documentation records my footsteps taken to walk the borders of the borders of this historical map in its contemporary context. It represents a larger archive of walked borders.

The book is a culmination of a series of polaroids documenting steps I took in the Central West End, alongside a system of mapping and an ongoing archive of research on divides in the City of St. Louis.