Prior Occupants

Alison Nguyen is a visual artist working across video, installation, performance, and sculpture. Using approaches of speculative fiction, documentary research, and embodied performance, Nguyen creates works that reconsider how narratives operate within the individual, the institution, the archive, and the politics of cultural memory. In _Prior Occupants_, her compelling new film for High Line Originals, co-commissioned with CHANEL Culture Fund, Nguyen explores the historical narratives that persist—and those quietly erased—within sites of adaptive reuse. As a point of entry, the artist considers the obscure nuclear history of the Westbeth Artists Housing building, which housed the former headquarters for Bell Laboratories, a research facility tied to the development of the atomic bomb. Inspired by a severed fragment of the original High Line freight rail left embedded in Westbeth's facade and the High Line's own history of transformation, Nguyen reflects on the lineage of both sites, and their current contradictions within the context of their surrounding neighborhood. Long before Westbeth's 1970 conversion into a historic public housing community for artists, the building complex was occupied by Western Electric and later Bell Laboratories—a crucible of innovation where critical developments in cinema, telecommunications, and military technology converged. Both Bell Labs and Westbeth were founded on grand, utopian ambitions: one dedicated to technological advancement, the other to state-subsidized artistic life. Nguyen interrogates what remains of these dual ideals, anchoring her exploration in interviews tied to the building's lesser-known past. Fragmented voiceovers that line the work include architect Tod Williams, who at age 23 was tasked with measuring and drawing plans of Westbeth while Bell Labs researchers were actively vacating the premises, and photographer and long-time resident Nick Suttle. Suttle recounts his grandfather's tenure at Bell Labs working on early radar technology—a career that ended abruptly when he later refused to work on a government contract for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). _Prior Occupants_ is a layered assemblage of audiovisual materials, including choreographed performance sequences, excerpts of interviews, and match-cut transitions that align historical photographs with present-day perspectives of both the High Line and Westbeth. To confront the impermanence of the physical archive, Nguyen projected historic documents and late-1960s site visit photos by architect Richard Meier directly onto the basement walls of Westbeth—scarred and in disrepair following Hurricane Sandy—and re-filmed them in situ. Threaded throughout the film is a recurring voice-over by artist and resident Robin Parkinson, dryly performing sections of Jacques Derrida's 1984 essay, No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives). Derrida's text addresses speed, capitalistic acceleration, and the unprecedented threat of nuclear warfare, proposing that total nuclear destruction would erase the very conditions of human memory and the symbolic "archive" itself. Nguyen's film organically evolved through relationships formed with past and present Westbeth artists and architectural archives. The majority of the performers in the film are either Westbeth residents or deeply tied to its community. Performance sequences unfold inside historic spaces within the complex, including its endless hallways, the former Bell Labs cafeteria, and the 11th-floor studio space formerly occupied by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Martha Graham Dance Company. By juxtaposing these layered histories against contemporary footage of nearby developments—such as the Google campus and Hudson Yards' Vessel—Nguyen exposes both the continuity and the present-day frictions within the surrounding neighborhood. Questioning the relationship between ruination, preservation, and cultural production, _Prior Occupants_ asks what it means to stage the decay of an industrial past within public environments and housing. Nguyen positions the High Line not merely as a site for public recreation, but as an active conduit of historical consciousness, foregrounding the ways the structures of the past quietly haunt our future-present. Part of High Line Channel, High Line Originals is High Line Art's commissioning program for artists working in time-based media. This initiative invites emerging or underrecognized US-based artists, nominated by a trusted group of contemporary curators, to submit a proposal for a new video work that considers the context of the park in a meaningful way and will resonate with our diverse audience.