Requiem
Hughen/Starkweather's video Requiem was shown at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, from Nov 2016 through June 2017 in the exhibition From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art.
Requiem was part of Hughen/Starkweather’s multi-year exploration of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The video was made on the artists’ final drive over the condemned East Span of the bridge on the day before it was permanently closed in 2013. This 75 year-old bridge, part of the daily landscape of hundreds of thousands of Bay Area commuters for decades, now exists only in documentation and collective memory.
The East Span was originally constructed in 1936 as a two-tiered railroad bridge. It partially collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and was slated for demolition.
As part of their Bay Bridge Project, Hughen/Starkweather spent years researching the bridge, its history, and its future. The artists conducted personal interviews with bridge architects and engineers; they researched commute patterns, environmental data, topographical maps and diagrams, architecture and engineering drawings, and historic and current photographs. They toured the construction site multiple times via foot, boat, and construction elevator (to the top of the 20-story tower scaffolding). See more images from that project here.
Still from Hughen/Starkweather, Requiem, video, 5 min, 2013
Still from Hughen/Starkweather, Requiem, video, 5 min, 2013