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.
La Conchita remaps the problematic of living with disaster in
California in immediate, raw terms, since the trauma is always already
here. People can’t leave, because they can’t sell their
houses. Many also believe that the hillside can be stabilized,
yet the geologic surveys suggest otherwise.
You find everywhere spontaneous creation and maintenance of vernacular
shrines to the dead on the site of the mudslide, still a massive
event in the middle of the town, one year later.
Chain link barriers a rubble of mud, destroyed house frames,
roofs, retaining walls, play yards, swing sets and crushed cars. As
remains are hidden by the debris mound, at the same time their presence
and meaning is evoked through a persistent maintenance of spontaneous
shrines.
La Conchita inspires palimpsets.
Place is (psyche) + (a landscape of data): documentary
photography meshes into geographic visualizations (as topologic
wireframe renderings) data online at the Department of Geography,
University of California, Santa Barbara. Using data
visualization in a subjective context , the sublime comes into play,
since a mathematics of chaos determines the scales of time and
periodicity in the always already traumatized place of La Conchita. The
sublime and the datascape conflate in a way that suggests some
analogies to the landscape of automatic cinema described by Deleuze in
Cinema2: The Time-Image (1985/1989).
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.
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 religious belief expressed at La Conchita?
Something like a hope, that the world of art and of faith might share,
that we are not alone. The ritual of the site is, or could be, to
let the world know “we are not alone.” Nonetheless ritual and site
study alike are undertaken beneath agnostic winter skies whose storms
trigger dissolution of the rincons.
Is it, the photographic act of documenting the artifacts of
disaster, and the subsequent abstraction therefrom, a leave-taking, or
a form-repetition? Does art simulate a zone of return -- moving
across the site’s chain link fences? Persephone goes to the
underworld, but she returns. She is always en train de something
else, becoming, recursively, thereby performing survival in the face of
literally crushing adversity and its anticipation. In and out of
the ground, Kore generates a topology. If she suggests the impulse to
make signs of recursion, memorial, and return, then a documentary
photographic and videographic remit cannot ignore masking, tokens,
offerings, prayer flags, and messages to the dead, and further, cannot
forget that its own action is part of the same typology. 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, at once art and ritual itself? The work
desires more than re-presentation, wants presence, in the repeat.
Intuitively, the performance of documentation wants both to observe La
Conchita and to sublimate its terro(i)r in images that move from the
erasure of the community to its recuperation and return.
Christina McPhee 10 January 2006
See Photographs
See
Also
http://www.christinamcphee.net/la_conchita.html
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