OCCUPATION OF THE PIONEER MONUMENT
AT THE THE CIVIC CENTER
AND THE UNITED NATIONS PLAZA
Embassy of the Refugee: EDELO Where The United Nations Used To Be
COMING SOON
Embassy of the Refugee: Where the United Nations Used to Be. As a visual confrontation with architectural symbols of state power, the Embassy of the Refugee wraps around the controversial Pioneer monument at SF Civic Center.
It works as a temporary public art installation that reimagines monuments by centering communities in movement—those displaced by violence, economic hardship and climate change, bringing forward the histories of undocumented migrants, refugees, disabled and the displaced, and underground labor forces whose contributions are often erased from collective memory. Through weekly community workshops grounded in Theater of the Oppressed, Invisible Theater and hands-on object-making sessions, we cultivate an environment of shared experience—a space where our lived realities can be expressed, embodied and collectively disseminated. These practices invite participants to transform personal narratives into communal acts of resistance, using performance and material creation as tools for dialogue.
At the center of the project are Embassador refugees—figures whose movement unsettles the political imagination of the nation-state. They have been occupying the monument by wrapping the scaffolding in gold mylar emergency blankets, slowly constructing an architecture of refuge within a monument dedicated to conquest.
Working from within this framework, I've been collaborating with the community that already inhabits the monument and its surrounding sidewalks. Rather than arriving with predetermined forms, the work has emerged through shared time and personal histories, laughter, and ongoing exchanges. We have spread the gold mylar from the scaffold onto the bodies and objects of those who inhabit this space, it carries the dual language of survival and celebration. Wagons, mobility devices, shoes, shovels, trash bins, and other objects that sustain everyday life become temporarily adorned—part emergency blanket, part royal regalia—before returning to circulation, quietly shifting the monument's center of gravity toward those who have always sustained it from below.
We are many, if we come together we can defeat the system -Devon with the Freedom Wagon
just a lil clip of some community members we asked to sing
Pioneer Monument
Monument Lab Residency, California, San Fransisco (2026)
Invited by Kaleb Duarte, we create Embassy of the Refugee: A dramatic architectural intervention at the Pioneer Monument using scaffolding, plywood, and netting suggestive of refugee tents to center the histories of undocumented migrants and displaced peoples.
