For MISSION 17’s 2009 Visual/Cultural Criticism Residency, David Buuck and BARGE presented 17 Reasons Why, a site-specific installation and research office, which constructed a visual archeology of the Mission and 17th Street environment, as part of an ongoing multi-media investigation into how we see, know, and understand everyday urban spaces.

Buuck and B.A.R.G.E. brought their toolkit of aesthetic and critical practices to tackle the thorny task of representing the gallery’s immediate surroundings in all of its historical and cultural complexity. They opened a functioning ‘research station’ in the gallery space, where they pursued their investigations throughout the run of the exhibition as an ongoing performance, which foregrounded the dynamic, transformative forces at work in the neighborhood, and made visible the methodologies of visual criticism and interpretation.

Through their installation and public programming, Buuck and BARGE created a space for reflection on the complex intersections of place and memory, change and nostalgia, history and its representations. They ‘sampled’ from the site and its environs, and used the installation space as a kind of laboratory for materialist re-mixing. What emerged was a critical poetics, consisting of maps, photography, writing, sculpture, and found materials.