Installation for PLAY/GROUND 2022 in collaboration with Jacob Todd Broussard.

Mighty Real addresses the symbiotic relationship between marginal architectural spaces and marginal communities that find refuge in them. Unlike other abandoned buildings in Buffalo, the scale and specificity of the grain silos make them difficult buildings to demolish, re-program or repurpose. Historically, marginalized communities have found refuge in such marginalized architectures; when a building exists on the periphery of public attention, it can provide shelter for populations that necessitate periphery. Within these spaces, shelter and community foster creativity. The misfit user finds use for the misfit building.

The project locates an ad-hoc dance floor on the ground of one of the vertical grain silos. Suspended within the metal silo above the dance floor, a speaker plays music by the late Patrick Cowley, a Buffalo native and pioneer of queer underground dance music. Though Cowley found his success in San Francisco, the resourcefulness of his art is often credited to his connection to the Rust Belt. Although no queer dance parties in the silos have been documented, it is not impossible to believe that the silos could have been, or could still be, put to such use.

The hollow silo transforms Cowley’s music into howls that distort but retain its familiar danceability. The round drum of the silo and its single aperture to the sky suspend above the dance floor, replacing the expected mirror ball, which has instead migrated to the floor. The mirrored tiles vary in scale from the size of a standard laminate 12”x12” tile to the dense 5mm tiling of a standard disco ball. The visitor is unsure what their permission is to interact with the dancefloor; the music beckons them to dance, but their feet leave visible traces. This tension embodies the temporality of this type of occupation–resourceful and inventive but risky, ad-hoc, and fleeting, much like the relationship between the buildings and the communities that use them.

Images of Cowley and imagined users of the dance floor are memorialized in small scale speculative paintings that occupy the walls of the silo, looking onto the dance floor and its current users.

Red lights bathe the silo for the opening night, obscuring the paintings, floor and its occupants. For the following two days of the exhibition, the lighting returns to neutral, exposing the traces of the visitors who danced on the mirror tiles and how they, too, queered its contents.