Fred Schmidt-Arenales

At the end of 2020 I drove from Denver, Colorado to Philadelphia, PA with my father Ben. As we drove east, tracing a path that reversed the historical trajectory of westward expansion, we spoke about decolonization, climate change, and what we imagined might be next for our world.

COMMITTEE OF SIX is an enactment of archival meeting minutes held at the University of Chicago. The meetings took place in 1955 between community leaders and University officials for the purpose of creating an “Urban Renewal Program" for the neighborhood of Hyde Park, situated in the south side of Chicago. The film documents the process of a group of performers, academics, residents, and activists interpreting the archival documents, inviting comparison between the language of the past and the contemporary reality of gentrification and racist real estate practices in Chicago.

Juxtaposing real-world interviews with corps officers, footage of bureaucratic procedures, and historical narratives of local environmental infrastructure projects with staged civic action and musical performances, Schmidt–Arenales’s film untangles the irony at the heart of the Ike Dike project: the industries it is designed to protect are the very industries driving the escalation of superstorms in Texas and around the globe. And the communities and ecosystems that are most threatened by rising sea levels and storms will continue to bear the brunt of the Ike Dike’s costly shortcomings. IT IS A GOOD PROJECT AND SHOULD BE BUILT offers perspectives on intervening in purposefully opaque bureaucratic procedures and demonstrates the importance of questioning seemingly innocuous administrative performances through imaginative and collaborative methods. --Max Fields