The empty visitor center in LOVE Park now lights up with Philly immigrants, old and new

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The old visitor center building in LOVE Park has been dark for 10 years. Now the spaceship-shaped building with 360 degrees of glass will light up every night for a month with film portraits of city residents showing off their respective heritages.

“The Philadelphians” is a public art project by Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib that highlights the city’s immigrant roots as a cinematic tapestry. Ten short films about 10 individuals are stitched together on a loop that wraps around the visitor’s center.

“The building, because of it being a circular space and it’s lit from within, it has an element of being a beacon,” Hironaka said. “It calls people in and brings people together both to view the piece but also to think about the city collectively.”

Hironaka and Suib created the film installation as part of a yearlong residency in the city’s Office of Immigrant Affairs as part of Public Works, a program of Mural Arts Philadelphia and the Forman Arts Initiative to place artists into city departments.

This is the second project of Public Works, the first being Anula Shetty’s “Philly Daydreams: Stories in Transit,” a 2023 film installation inside the City Hall SEPTA station concourse.

The ten films feature first-generation immigrants fresh to the city as well people with longer roots here. One of the subjects can trace her ancestors to the original Swedish immigrants who arrived in the mid-17th century, predating the founding of Philadelphia.

The film participants have heritages from Sweden, China, Honduras, Mexico, Jamaica, Italy, Afghanistan, Dominican Republic and Eritrea.

“This is a piece about how Philadelphia is an immigrant city and has embraced immigrants for its entire history,” Suib said.

“The federal government right now is enacting policies that are about denying certain kinds of status to people, but this city embraces those same people and always has,” he said. “Whereas the federal government says, ‘No, you don’t belong here,’ Philadelphia embraces you and says, ‘You do belong here.’”

In some cases, Philadelphia literally embraces newcomers. One of the films about an immigrant from Afghanistan features an anecdote about their first days in the city.

“There was an Arabic grocery store in our first neighborhood here,” reads the text of the short film. “When we went in for the first time the shopkeeper asked, ‘I haven’t seen you before, are you new to the area?’ I told him we just arrived last week from Afghanistan.”

“He came out from behind the counter and hugged me,” it continued. ‘Come in anytime, whether you have money or not, and pick what you need. Just don’t let your family go hungry.”

The subjects were interviewed for the films, but they have no audio for logistical reasons: Simultaneous projections in a public outdoor place would turn film sound into a jumbled cacophony.

Hironaka and Suib asked the subjects to take them to places in Philadelphia that feel significant to them. They used both digital video and 16mm celluloid, and incorporated historic footage sourced from Temple University’s Urban Archives media collection.

Suib said he wanted to evoke the feel of home movies.

“We held the cameras. We kept it really informal. No tripods, no lights,” he said. “We’re at a moment in our country where there’s a pretty hostile climate towards immigrants. This piece is largely responsive to that. We wanted to empower all of our participants to have a say in how they were portrayed.”

In 2016, the visitor’s center building closed for the renovations of LOVE Park, and even then it was hardly used. The city’s Department of Parks and Recreation has attempted to find a use for it, at one point coming close to a lease deal with a restauranteur, which ultimately fell through.

In the coming weeks, Parks and Rec is expected to send out a request for proposal round to solicit a new tenant.

“The Philadelphians” will be on view nightly, after dark, until June 8.