Tash Kimmell

Before the Winter of 2025, I rarely thought about maps. How they smooth cliff edges or turn winding rivers into blue dotted lines. The way they flatten mountains and skylines. Now, I think about them all the time. About how the maps we make affect people’s lives, and how the places we come from shape our ideas about the world, and, more recently, the people and policies we vote for.

If you turned on the news last December in California, you were likely to hear something about the “Redistricting Wars”:  a nationwide political arms race triggered by  Texas Republicans.  The so-called war saw both red and blue states utilizing a technique called gerrymandering, redrawing voting maps in their favor in hopes of gaining a political majority in DC. In California, Democrats drafted Prop 50, redistricting the state’s own maps ahead of midterm elections.

The shift changes California’s political landscape, reshuffling urban and rural voters,  further inflaming a socio-political phenomenon known as  the “urban-rural divide.”

In Northern California, this division has gained special attention as rural conservatives prepare to be represented by a Democrat for the first time in over a decade. Now, in a district with liberal, urban communities, like my hometown, rural voters fear their political voice will be diluted. These deep geographical divides are fueled in large part by “rural resentment,” a concept that rose alongside the downturn of rural economies across the country.

With a background in journalism, I traveled through my newly configured home district, interviewing Californians throughout the landscape, attempting to understand how place-based inequality hardens into rural resentment and how resentment informs political choice. This audio-visual installation asks not whether we agree, but whether we can overcome the identitarianism at the heart of political polarization. By placing these voices in proximity, I ask the audience to sit and engage with these characters in a gesture of deep listening, opening the possibility for an imagined alternative.