Terrain Vague is a 16mm photo-roman, based on the images and accompanying log of a fictional female researcher who, over the summer of 2016, chronicles the development of a new private, university-based innovation center from the shell of a former color and coatings laboratory in a poor and working class Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood--an industrial hub that shuttered in the wake of the crisis of 2008.
In her investigations into the history of the site and its environs, her peregrinations around the city (including a stop at the fateful 2016 Democratic National Convention), and her interactions with a beleaguered real estate agent, the researcher reflects on the cycles of creative destruction that permanently transform the urban landscape, providing openings for new schemes and entrepreneurial science fictions of development.