Documenting architecture and memories of a changing neighborhood

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As filmmaker Charles Burnett narrates memories from growing up in the historically Black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles, the camera pans from object to object in different spaces—from one plant to another in a home, from braids to a pile of V-neck shirts in a store, from a coffee pot to a menu on the wall in a cafe.

This is Philadelphia artist David Hartt’s 15-minute film “On Exactitude in Science (Watts),” in which he used preprogrammed movements on a motorized gimbal to dictate the velocity and length of the pans—a nonhuman way of looking at a scene. The film also uses photogrammetry—uploading thousands of photographs of a scene into a 3D program, putting the resulting 3D model into a game engine, and animating a walkthrough of the landscape.

“I was interested in: How would an alien look at an environment and try to understand it?” says Hartt, an associate professor of fine arts at Penn’s Weitzman School of Design, whose work frequently deals with the built environment. Hartt is not from Watts, but he describes himself as someone who is “naturally curious to experience cultural positions that are other than my own” in a way that is honest and authentic.

Now, amid the 250th anniversary of the United States, the Canadian-born artist is one of five artists represented in an exhibition focused on the “memories, dreams, and histories of Black Americans”: “Freedom Dreams,’ on view at the Barnes in Philadelphia until Aug. 9. Hartt says it was a huge honor to be asked to participate, and he thinks that he is representing “a very broad and expansive understanding of Blackness in America, one that is both deeply rooted and diasporic.”

“I think that for too long, the Black experience has allowed itself to be marginalized, and what I think that the Barnes is attempting to do is to represent it as central and core to the American experience,” Hartt says. “It’s not an African American experience—it’s an American experience.”

It’s a big year for Hartt’s work in Philadelphia. He has a film at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art as part of its Shakers exhibition, also on view until Aug. 9, and one of his tapestries is on display at a Fabric Workshop and Museum exhibition.

“What does it mean to make your home in a place?” questions Hartt, who has lived in Philadelphia for 11 years. “For me, part of it is feeling as though I’m actually making a contribution to the cultural landscape. This is really exciting to have the work registered and available this way for such an important year.”

Showing decades-old memories and present-day Watts

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York commissioned “On Exactitude in Science (Watts)” for its 2021 exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. The vertically shot film opens with the text “street, alley, vacant lot, factory, school, office, shop, house, apartment, fence, yard, porch, door, roof, parlor, kitchen”—representative of both the spatial typologies that MoMA articulated in its brief and of spaces featured in Burnett’s 1978 film “Killer of Sheep,” which inspired Hartt’s film.

Hartt visited Los Angeles three times: to build relationships with community members and scout locations, to film at these sites, and to interview Burnett, who talked about the personal experiences and memories that shaped his screenwriting.

The furniture stores, Largo Theatre, and other businesses on 103rd Street. The train coming through a field next to a park with olive trees. Working-class Black families living in the same environment as doctors and lawyers.

Watts has changed a lot and is now a majority Latino neighborhood, and Hartt’s film presents Burnett’s recollections narrated over present-day imagery. “He might be talking about something very specific, and the film is showing—for lack of a better word—the kind of future state,” Hartt says.

This ties into Hartt’s rationale for the title of the film, which comes from a one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a community that falls in and out of love with cartography.

“What he’s getting at is the impossibility of representing anything with complete fidelity,” Hartt says. “In order to represent the territory with complete fidelity, the map would have to exist 1:1, and so everything is an approximation, everything is an abstraction.”

Hartt likens this to the divide he portrays between Burnett’s memories of Watts and the present-day Watts. “The space was constantly drifting apart in terms of those two realities,” Hartt says. “And so every map you see is out of date in as much as the community it represents continues to live and evolve, and I really loved that idea.”