Artist:
Dorit Margreiter (born 1967 in Vienna, Austria; lives and works in Vienna, Austria).
Rebecca Baron (born 1968 in Baltimore, USA; lives and works in Los Angeles, USA).

Material:
Installation of 35mm film; color; sound; 13 min 58 sec.

Description:
“In the film installation Poverty Housing. Americus, Georgia filmmaker Rebecca Baron and artist Dorit Margreiter address the subject of the reenactment and display of poverty as in the case of the ‘Global Village Discovery Center’ in Americus, Georgia (USA), which contains a replica of an existing South African slum. The theme park which is operated by a non-profit association serves to raise money for the association’s social activities through the graphic visualization of poverty. The work raises questions about the relationship of subject and image, production, and reproduction, as well as about the manipulative power of images in general, the documentary value of film, the mechanisms of art production, the process of film-making and the mediatized representation of reality. Margreiter and Baron employ technological processes and forms of presentation derived from the fields of architecture and design as well as from film and documentary.”
—“Poverty Housing. Americus, Georgia,” Dorit Margreiter website.

“Poverty Housing. Americus, Georgia (2008, in collaboration with Rebecca Baron) also investigates the circulation of images of modern architecture, although in this case the social context to which it refers is different. This film installation, shot in documentary style, shows replicas, based on photographic images, of shanties found in South African slums. Conceived as an architectural ‘theme park’ in rural Georgia, it may have been designed to prick the consciences of its neoliberal visitors, yet it cannot escape a certain delectation in the aesthetics of poverty.”
—Press release, “Description,” Reina Sofia website.