A grammar built with rocks
410 Cottage Home St., Los Angeles, CA 90012
Saturday, September 29 at 7:00 PM 10:00 PM
Ends Nov 4, 2018
Carmen Argote, Julien Creuzet, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), Sandra de la Loza, Regina José Galindo, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys, Zara Kuredjian, Uriel Orlow, Gala Porras-Kim, Susan Silton, and Cauleen Smith Public programs October 20 & 21, noon-6pm Screening, Basma Alsharif: Ouroboros (on loop during gallery hours) October 26, 7pm Screening, Adam Khalil and Jackson Polys: The Informants Followed by a conversation with Adam Khalil, Jackson Polys, K. Wayne Yang, and Oscar Gutiérrez October 28, 2pm Conversation between Cauleen Smith and Raquel Gutiérrez A grammar built with rocks presents artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, and question narratives of socioecological crisis that contribute to the displacement and erasure of people and collective formations. Through a two-part group exhibition, public programming, and publication, the project aims to think with the land–materially and relationally–in order to unpack and historicize notions of waste and contamination as they relate to the politics of access, property, and the violence of land allotment. Together, the featured works explore how the materiality of land permeates our identities and representational structures, and simultaneously molds the body. The project appropriates its title from Édouard Glissant’s writings, as it looks to the ways in which the landscape contains, unfolds, and narrates its own history. It searches for traceable fissures within contested sites, as an aftermath of violence and altering states of upheaval. The exhibition at Human Resources considers the material, psychic, and social relations that constitute place as a site of knowledge production, and the “below” (below-ground, below-surface) as emblematic of both resistance and retreat. Together, the works and programs expose the violence inherent in geographic processes (of territorialization, privatization, and urban renewal) and offer artistic methodologies (of documentation, performance, and embodied archival practices) that surface buried histories and reorient perspectives to understand land as a bearer of relationships, resilience, and memory. The exhibition at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries extends this inquiry to center on the interrelation between the body and place, exploring how discourses of value and waste (through motifs of the toxic, the disposable, the contaminant) influence individual and collective spatial agency. A grammar built with rocks began with research into the 1950s history of the Chavez Ravine evictions, and expanded with the following questions: How does unearthing soil, sediments, remnants, and buried life-forms open up space for concealed voices and histories, and reveal interconnected systems of power and violence on people and place? What does thinking geography relationally rather than territorially look like? How do meta-narratives of development, modernization, and crisis contribute to practices of dispossession? Curated by Shoghig Halajian and Suzy Halajian.
  • 👀Must see
  • 🤍AAPI-owned