Video documentation of the bandana-catapulting of the Bixby Hill gated community in Long Beach CA. The participants were from the Catalytic exhibition at Cal-State Long Beach where student functions were routinely the subject of noise complaints from residents of Bixby Hill.
Neighbor-Hood (or its working title: Isn’t 'Gated-Community' an Oxymoron) is a participatory intervention that reveals the resemblance between gated communities and street gangs. Both communities are attentive in controlling what outsiders have access to their area, but have developed different approaches to this timeless issue. Street gangs have utilized the modern approach of racketeering and drive-by-shootings, while gated communities have resorted to the conventional wall with a guarded entrance, but with the addition of deed restrictions to give their classic approach to territorial control a contemporary flare.
Neighbor-Hood attempts to bring these two groups together by distributing colored bandanas with instructions for folding a doo-rag and making gang-signs to citizens of gated communities. Two approaches have been used for this. The first is the Trojan horse tactic of folding the bandanas into flowers, rolling the instructions into paper stems, and leaving them in a basket at the entrance to the gate to be taken in as gifts. However, for situations where a guard may be present—a Viking style catapult small enough to be fired from the back seat of a car is used to circumvent the wall of the community. This contemporary revision of a classic siege device is then lent to participants to perform their own drive-by-bandana-catapulting.
