LINES BETWEEN US

Collaborator: Brent Kokonya

In the 1930s, a fence was constructed to separate the Ribicoff Cottages in New Haven from Woodin Street in Hamden, Connecticut. What may have appeared at the time to be a mundane piece of infrastructure has since evolved into something far more significant: a symbol of the social, racial, and economic divisions embedded in the physical landscape of our cities. Though the fence was not explicitly erected with ideological intent, it has functioned whether deliberately or by consequence as a boundary that reinforces patterns of segregation, exclusion, and disconnection.

This project takes the fence as both subject and site, interrogating the latent power of architectural barriers to shape civic life and collective identity. The fence is more than a line; it is a layered signifier part infrastructure, part memory, part social artifact. It represents how race and class have been stratified not through overt declarations, but through subtle and enduring spatial separations.

Through this work, I aim to examine the wall not simply as a utilitarian object, but as an urban device an agent that organizes space, behavior, and belonging. The installation will reimagine the fence as a site of transformation: a place where boundaries can be reinterpreted, softened, or even subverted. Can a wall become a meeting place instead of a dividing line? Can a fence carry both histories of exclusion and futures of connection?

By engaging the community on both sides of the fence, the project invites conversation about what divides us and what might bring us together. It is not just an architectural intervention, but a social and historical one drawing attention to the physical limits we inherit, the narratives they hold, and the collective agency we have to reshape them.