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Christoph Steger // Moving Images

The Alhambra Project (with Lynn Marie Kirby)
The Alhambra Theatre, Russian Hill neighborhood, various locations, San Francisco, CA





A collaboration with Lynn Marie Kirby involving the Russian Hill community in San Francisco. The Alhambra Project was as a neighborhood-wide installation based around the former Alhambra Theatre, now a Crunch Gym, in San Francisco’s Russian Hill. The theater, built in 1926 as a movie palace, was inspired by the original Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain — an architectural wonder of the Moorish empire and a testament to the coexistence of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions in Europe.

The Alhambra Project combines an archive of neighborhood conversations with a series of video and performance pieces resulting from collaborations with artists from across the globe. Visitors are guided through the neighborhood with a smartphone app that activates the blocks surrounding the former Theater. The project illuminates layered site-specific history, exploring cultural patterning and visions of exoticism, while using the Theatre’s gym conversion as a locus for interrogating the shifting demographics of the neighborhood.

 Concept and Realisation: Lynn Marie Kirby & Christoph Steger
Geolocation App Design and Concept: Christoph Steger
Coding: Sam Elie
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