“Scatter Piece” is a site-specific performance piece in which I routinely scatter multilingual-translated printed copies of a poem in my working class neighborhood to address ongoing housing and small business displacement. I particularly focus on 65 Ocean Avenue, a site of anticipated redevelopment into market-rate luxury housing. Presently the address holds a preschool, and was originally a grocery store in the 1950s. The proposed housing arguably creates inequity and will simply add to the vacant market rate units in the city that are unaffordable for San Francisco families, including those who are historically marginalized (low-income and of color). The performance is part of my long term project “A HXSTORY OF RENTING,” a multiplatform body of work examining displacement and gentrification in San Francisco, California, USA, from my lens as a born and raised third-generation renter in the city.

The poem is translated into languages spoken in my neighborhood, including Tagalog, Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Ilocano, and more. My translators are fellow artists and community organizers who are renters in the city and across the globe.

“Scatter Piece” bears the multilayered physicality and cycle of displacement: through the bounds of copy paper replenished with the multilingual poem; I, as the performer, laboriously scattering the poems; the poems taking weight on the proposed luxury development perimeter; passersby witnessing the foreboding message; and the poem as ephemeral litter cleaned up within that week—the ritual is perpetually repeated. At this time, the piece will be performed indefinitely, until the city addresses community concerns regarding the proposed luxury housing’s lack of affordability for local residents.