In summer of 2021, the Cook County Department of Corrections began the demolition of two jail dormitories. The buildings, perhaps best known for housing the likes of Al Capone, were more than a hundred years old. The artist Maria Gaspar, who grew up in Little Village, the same neighborhood where the jail is located, documented the demolition and site restoration over the course of two years. She positioned her camera across the street from the project, fixing its view on the long concrete wall that marks the border between the jail and the residential neighborhood. The result is Clamour, which is sixty hours and twenty minutes in duration and captures one section of the building block being torn down, from start to finish.
The extended run time of the video — which makes it effectively impossible to view in a single sitting — creates a tension between the persistence of carceral architecture and the possibility of resisting the logic it sustains. This tension is amplified by the scale of the institution itself. To this day, Cook County Jail remains the largest single-site jail in the United States, with an average daily population of approximately 9,000 people. The work’s collapsing of nine months of demolition, and a history that spans generations, offers a way to imagine the dismantling of structures that have shaped the lives of people both inside and outside the jail’s walls.
As part of the exhibition, the public is invited to a special performance on Friday, February 27, 2026, at 5 p.m. of We Lit a Fire and Trusted the Heat (After Angela Davis) by Gaspar and activated by musician Thaddeus Tukes. In the performance, Tukes plays a variety of percussive instruments, including Gaspar’s sonic sculpture made of iron bars salvaged from the same demolition featured in the film. Through the sounding of carceral debris, the artists activate the bars through generative touch and vibration, transforming materials of confinement into resonant sites of collective imagination and liberation.
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About Contemporary Film, Video, and Sound Series
Maria Gaspar’s Clamour is part of the Contemporary Film, Video, and Sound Series, which features a rotating selection of works focusing on alternative archives. The series is curated by Katja Rivera, Curator of Contemporary Art, and support is generously provided by The Margaret L. Lane Fund, the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities at Colorado College, and the CC Music Department.
Top image: Film still from Maria Gaspar’s Clamour (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist.
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