Insurgent Infrastructure edges between non-fiction storytelling and embodied hallucination. The artwork is a tessellated amalgamation of ghostly figures fashioned in clear resin that synchronize into an illusory mythological scene. Not immediately legible to the audience is the artwork’s dramatization of two opposing social forces in San Diego’s history— courageous activists who stood up against U.S. imperialism; and the right-wing forces, which attempted to stop them in the name of saving the nation’s values.

Much like an urban archeological study, the artwork exhumes the corpse of anti-imperialism from the Southern California landscape otherwise haunted by the veneer of urban renewal. The piece traces a tapestry of invisible narratives including: mutinies on naval aircraft carriers; peaceful protests turned-violent; the distribution of outlawed leftist printed media; as well as the invisible traumas incurred as a result of this activism. Occurring within the inaccessible spaces of military bases, these erased activist histories are delicately forged into a miniature structure informed as much by European Rococo or Chinese Dongyang wood carvings as it is by the ghostly nature of San Diego’s memory of this political movement.