[-empyre-] volume zero: expanding the circle: generative inquiry

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

dear -empyre-

GH writes,


'Both Isabelle and Marc talk about, starting from zero.  Maybe the  
idea is to start from one and then expand the circle."


Reflecting on this zero ground, (ironically, after nine eleven), I'd  
like to talk about my own practice, which develops out of using new  
media/multimedia as a tool for generative inquiry.

I spent 20 years painting and drawing layered architectural  
landscapes, on paper and canvas,  before this.  My life situation was  
such, that I started over, in a sense, from 'ground zero' , in 2000.  
I did this as a way to 'mediate' traumatic memory and violence in my  
personal history and to renew my life. And to try to use media as a  
critical form of inquiry as well as sensuous performance.  I sensed  
that the 'landscape of memory' was a psychic field that could be  
expressed through electronic/tectonic forms, in large scale cinematic  
arrays.  I responded  Louis Kahn's way of describing this, in design  
process, as "volume zero".  (see http://www.worldviewcities.org/dhaka/ 
philadelphia2.html and http://www.worldviewcities.org/dhaka/ 
philadelphia2.html

Wonderful things have happened because of this decision. Not least,  
our conversations  here; also, the opportunity to bring work to  
places all over the world, from Australia to Germany, London to New  
York, while I go on working in the 'outback' of California.


Today I develop site studies of cultural landscapes, resistance, and  
poetics of memory within a performance ethos, for installations using  
video and multimedia photography and the net.  In California, I try  
to bear witness to the x factor, the non site; seismic memory in  
earthquake country, the psychic space of the net as an aphasic  
terrain, the continuing trauma of mudslide and debris flow in coastal  
communities.

I wrote recently for Manifesta, the following response to the theme  
"What's Left":


“What’s Left”’ : the theme speaks directly to the poetics of absence  
and the problem of meaning in the wake of trauma, in landscapes that  
have been neglected or left to turmoil and destruction.  Aftermath  
interests me, as much as the event itself. How artists may work at  
the margins of the media culture still with the tools of it but  
without the constraints.

  How we are both in utter poverty of spirit, having lost any  
hegemony of power and voice as we are subsumed like everybody into  
the global mix; and yet, how we still make work. What is this  
persistence, this resistance to giving up, to letting go, to  
forgetting? I may be aphasic, but I still speak: I may have to give  
up drawing for electronic media in order to communicate across  
borders, but I still draw. I have tried to develop conversations on  
related topics internationally on -empyre- throughout 2003-2006 (see  
www.subtle.net/empyre)  including such themes as  Neural Topologies  
of the Net, Border Crossings, Sites in Translation, “Whispering in  
the Dark” (on rematerialization of protest), inviting guests into the  
mix whose work and commmitment is to reaching across borders. It is  
an honor and a responsibility to participate in this discourse and  
with these artists because their work is witness, temoinage. Witness  
is the way of speaking to and of something incommensurate and  
sublime, through a visual or performative act, a kind of improvised  
ritual through its flat=out risk taking and direct  
approach.  ...something to do with the degree zero of performance as  
witness.

Perhaps a way into my practice methods and theory is to offer you the  
remit for my current site study,  a cinematic and photographic La  
Conchita mon amour (2005-2006) -- now interactive and in progress

http://christinamcphee.net/la_conchita_/texts/la_conchita_sitestudy.html

(the site requires quicktime 7 and flash 6 or above, fast connection  
as it has a lot of movies in it).


La Conchita is a community in north Ventura County whose inhabitants  
have been subject to massive debris flow mudslides in 1995 and 2005,  
and persist under the threat of continuing and inevitable  
recurrence.  The most recent event on January 10, 2005 caused the  
loss of ten lives and the destruction of a central part of the  
village.  Since last spring 2005  I have been documenting the site of  
the mudslide through digital and medium format photography and  
digital video.  My interest is to create a multivalent site study of  
the topology of disaster and trauma.

La Conchita remaps the problematic of living with disaster in  
California in immediate, raw terms, since the trauma is always  
already here.  There is no escape, save leaving the place, a choice  
few seem able to make, since their properties are impossible to  
remortgage or sell. Conditions are likely to become even more  
precarious as global warming intensifies winter storms.  You find  
everywhere spontaneous creation and maintenance of vernacular shrines  
to the dead on the site of the mudslide, quite massive and not  
cleaned up.

 Chain link fences surround the extensive site of loss, where the  
rubble of roofs and play yards, swing sets and crushed cars  
alternates with spontaneous shrines to the ones who died in the   
flow. These are continually being rearranged, and embellished.  The  
memorials are in a continuous condition of sublation, such that just  
as the remains are hidden by the debris mound, at the same time their  
presence and meaning is evoked through a persistent maintenance.

The works of art in this series consist in layering of multiple modes  
of information, as a palimpsest, within which alterity and  
disjunction integrate diverse kinds of visual information within a  
documentary series of site observations.

Thanks to the trust of people at La Conchita, I as a non-journalist,  
non-politician, am admitted to hidden spots, hard to access, places  
that are a kind of gift.  A performative use of photography and video  
observes but perhaps also alters the lush life between ‘fact’ and  
subjective response: my presence is active, not neutral, partly  
trusted, partly suspicious, as I move through the town’s ruined  
spaces, once private, now partially exposed to the ravages of the  
public eye and to the weather.

The spirit of an always-already endangered space is glimpsed at the  
margins of endless views of the disintegrating houses, the   
omnipresent slide debris, and the poignant gardens, topped with an  
illegal squat, a teepee, and defiant signs calling the Governor to  
task. When you combine these with geophysical mappings and sequence  
them in time, the landscape of data loses all neutrality. Sometimes  
the community seems to be closed up like the little shell of its name.

The presence of an impossible to fathom, yet starkly obvious threat,  
in the mudslide aftermath, makes La Conchita a prime site for  
exploring the sense of the sublime using layers of data, as a  
palimpsest.

At La Conchita, grim geologic realities subtend the vernacular  
gestures of prayer and remembrance. Perhaps there are no terms of  
rapprochment with La Conchita’s ineluctable precariousness and  
impossible future, yet people keep trying to make it right, to make  
it a place of life, a place that matters.  As do I, following in  
their trace.  This paradox suggests a ritual site and reflection on  
documentary as performance.

Does art simulate, or stimulate, a zone of return -- moving across  
the site’s chain link fences? Performing its own
becoming, and at a remove?  Is shooting the evidence like the hanging  
of a thing onto another thing, like a prayer flag
with a heart onto a chain link fence at La Conchita?

 Compulsive, futile, and generative all the same, this is the process
of performing a site as you study it. “Wherever buildings are  
broken...their damaged states ...suggest new forms of
thought and comprehension, and suggest new conceptions of space that  
confirm the potential of the human to integrate
itself, to be whole and free outside of any predetermined totalizing  
system” (Lebbeus Woods).

Ritual involves actions through intentions to nurture a belief or  
value of something that you hold precious. As an action
of retracing the action, one further maintains that belief: it is  
through the recursion of the action that the ritual holds
power. In what sense is there a spirituality of La Conchita?

Something like a hope, that the world of art and of faith might  
share, that we are not alone. The whole town becomes a ritual site  
that desires to affirm “we are not alone.” Even when government fails  
to help; even beneath the agnostic skies of blazing blue sunny days  
and the fierce storms that hasten the crumbling rincons. People say  
to me, “I’m making this memorial because we want to do something  
good.” Remember the lost ones, redeem the site for the living, to  
assert an absolute freedom of spirit and body even in
the face of a certain catastrophic future.




-cm











www.christinamcphee.net
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