In the comments for the video, Urbex Dane says that the daughter of the house’s owner, an elderly woman, reached out to him to explain that the house was taken over by squatters after she had to move out. Videos like this carry a deep sense of loss - not only personal loss, but the loss of what these homes represented. In what looks like a teenager’s bedroom, the wall is pasted with magazine cutouts of the likes of Gwen Stefani and Kanye West, along with several images of Barack Obama. The camera drifts patiently, observing canned food, a copy of Stuart Little, and portraits of a black family which span generations. What first seems like an impenetrable mess soon reveals the lives of the onetime residents. In “ Abandoned All Belongings and i Don’t Know Why ,” Urbex Dane probes a former home teeming with mountains of furniture, paperwork, and plastic. The houses seen in these videos are often not isolated cases, but emblematic of whole neighborhoods falling into disrepair.įrom “Abandoned all Belongings and i Don’t Know Why | Urban Exploring Abandoned House” (screenshot by the author for Hyperallergic) Many of these homes were vacated due to foreclosures and bankruptcies in the wake of the 2008 recession. “What would make someone leave all this behind?” they ask. Rather than emanate excitement, videos of such spaces are weighed down with melancholy. Their voices echoing, the companion says, “ I feel like we’re in the apocalypse ,” and Bell answers, “We kinda are.”įor many urbexers, abandoned residential homes especially resonate when the former residents didn’t take most of their possessions with them. They wander the impossibly clean open space. At the end of his video, Bell and a friend break into the now-shuttered Kmart. They no longer have to maintain the illusion of the American dream, since their customers don’t have a choice. If superstores and malls once represented consumerist success, the ones that survive serve as anchors in communities where the corporation in question has driven out all competition. That is why I’m kinda sad about Kmart going under,” he says. He sprinkles in reminiscences about going to Kmart with his grandfather and eating at the store’s greasy spoon restaurant. In “ THE END OF KMART: From Open to Closed to Abandoned ,” he makes three visits to a Kmart that’s going out of business, observing as the stacks become increasingly disorganized.
He edits classic commercials into his journeys, and seems drawn to relics of American kitsch. Bell’s videos offer both historical and personal context, and are rich with nostalgia.
#Young black woman urban explorer series#
YouTuber Dan Bell produces the “ Dead Mall Series ,” which is devoted to the subject. The ruins of Ancient Rome are aqueducts and coliseums America’s are malls and superstores. But in America, there is a specific subsection of videos that reveal the mundane decay of the suburbs.įrom “DEAD MALL SERIES : THE END OF KMART : From Open to Closed to Abandoned!” (screenshot by the author for Hyperallergic)
The most popular videos in this genre tend to delve into the locations of dreams and nightmares, like abandoned asylums and amusement parks. The community lives by the ethos “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.” Urbexers on YouTube document their adventures with cameras, cellphones, and drones. Urban exploration predates the internet, but has always been associated with video art and photography. For those who have a morbid curiosity about the decaying vestiges of America, the online urban exploration community is a gateway into the past and a mirror for the present. Seen in the video “ Abandoned MILLIONAIRES Family Mansion ” from the popular YouTube channel Exploring With Josh, the slogan is bitterly twisted by the mangled disrepair of the space. People no longer live here, but they still pass through. The house, which was built in 1901 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989, was abandoned in 2008 following the bankruptcy of its owner.
“ The World is Ours ” is graffitied onto the wood paneling of a derelict colonial revival mansion in Wakefield, Massachusetts. From “Abandoned MILLIONAIRES Family Mansion” (screenshot by the author for Hyperallergic)
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