found objects, performance, video, sound, archival documents, custom maps (2019)
Sedimentary Exits is an investigation into the partial histories, affects, and absences of place within the Harvard Heights neighborhood in central Los Angeles. One of the original suburbs to downtown L.A., Harvard Heights was founded by a restrictive covenant limiting access to homeownership and fixing value to private property. Today, it has been recently converted into an HPOZ (Historic Preservation Ordinance Zone) ushering in gentrification and celebrating its turn of the century architecture and the centrality of the single family estate to wealth generation. This installation struggles with the emerging paradoxes of belonging, blackness, landscape, absence, and value.
Over seven weeks I took a series of walks along the boundaries of the neighborhood, taking field recordings, collecting discarded objects, and performing small public rituals. Through this methodology of walking I gathered scraps and traces to use as a text upon which to read speculative histories of lives lived in a public that only exists in the residue of lost objects. I am interested in these readings as archives of desires, longing for a public life disallowed by private property interests. Through sound, video, ritual, and text I center the sedimentary absences that give form to the landscapes we traverse, and the desires that allow us to imagine beyond them.