Eve Andrée Laramée
NETHERZONE
NETHERZONE
NETHERZONE is a future vision of contemporary art involving interventions in places that have been transformed by natural and human-assisted disasters. NETHERZONE deals with the environmental psychology, psycho-geography, and pathetic fallacy concerning cultural attitudes towards an area of Southern California stretching from Death Valley to the Northeast, the Salton Sea to the Southeast, and incorporating Los Angeles to the far West. The NETHERZONE region follows the paths of major earthquake fault lines and other geomorphological features, and "maps" the role humankind has played in making physical changes to the region which have resulted in catastrophic imbalance. Utopian dreams and Dystopian disasters coexist in this terrain, comprising a natural history of discontinuities. Included in this lineage are the massive water projects by the Army Corps of Engineers and private developers who have transformed the land, as well as natural phenomena including earthquakes, landslides, windstorms, fires, floods and other cataclysms. The NETHERZONE project envisions a future where the distinctions of "nature" and "culture" become blurred; natural phenomena and human constructs become errant and intertwined. NETHERZONE is part of a long lineage of events and builds upon a historical framework by overlaying a fictional narrative onto the ecology of place. The pivotal points of the NETHERZONE are land developments, planned subdivisions and recreational communities constructed during the late '50s and early '60s. Entire infrastructures were built, communities planned. Roads were built, street signs installed, palm trees planted, sewer systems installed, yet few people actually settled there. Now there are modern ghost towns, simultaneously established and abandoned. This configuration which mazes between the Utopian and the Dystopian perhaps represents a place of past and future places, overlays of images, territory, names, desires, actions. Perhaps no distance is covered but a new terrain emerges - a place which is no place. An Elsewhere which is a technologically produced "disaster" as media or touristic spectacles, but also as phenomena of such vast scale that they can be seen as cataclysms. The way in which such cultural productions end up blurred with natural phenomena dusts my imagination with uncertainty and indeterminacy, and sets me on strange trajectories.
Notes from the field: The rental car as home is full of dirt, roving crumbs, crumbling maps, torn-out telephone book pages, dirty clothes, empty water bottles sucked dry, a crushed hat, displaced stones, more maps, receipts for road food, and two figs freshly picked from a tree in downtown Los Angeles, the "City of Quartz". I drive by the house I grew up in. It looks like a still photograph from another era superimposed on a movie of L.A. I spend the days in the desert. I look for places I've read or heard about which I cannot find. I see time in the stones. A canyon filled with volcanics, metamorphics and sedimentaries is riddled with fossils. I feel queasy with astonishment and the heat. The extreme is divine. What moves is either reptile or machine. The viewfinder of my camera as home. The quiet solitude of resting my good left eye against the cool black metal. The mind becomes quiet as it escapes through this hole. Light rays converge to fill the space inside. The stillness awakens cellular memories of earthquakes, floods, fires, riots, landslides, mud slides, debris flows, air pollution and drought. I think of the salty fluid surrounding my eyes as they blink in the sunlight coming through the lens. Question: What are the links between particular spatial phenomena and the ideas of inhabiting nothingness, psychic rootlessness and falling outside of ourselves? I believe I have temporarily lost my spatial/temporal geographic homeland. The zone between Mexico and the United States is the interstitial space of my recent meanderings. I have driven so many miles and walked and walked and I am tired today. Home in the past ten days has been a twenty-nine foot long boat, a rental car, and various rooms of differing sizes and degrees of hardness/softness. The cosmological systems which I habitually use to determine my sense of "hereness" are becoming brittle. Bit by bit they erode. I long to return to the edge of the map. To another black line separating land and sea. On the line, I sometimes find myself standing in water, sometimes on sand. Breathing is easier in this fluctuating NETHERZONE. A very strange phenomenon has occurred regarding my perception of space. I am beginning to sense the earth by degrees. The global positioning system I use, which triangulates signals from three satellites, gives me a digital reading of my exact position on the planet at anytime. I am getting a feeling - a somatic feeling - for what a degree, minute or second of latitude and/or longitude actually is. Somehow this is being mapped onto my body: the space of a breath, a stride, a gaze. The earth is even smaller than I thought. Much smaller than the insides of our selves, our cells. The interface of land and body, the collision of earth and water, the blurring of boundaries. Turning towards the water I survey a strange and compelling landscape, not idyllic, but scorched and wondrous, alive with the buzz of millions of flies. Returning to the car I drive through a barren creepy suburban vista. Acres of named streets with no houses, concrete foundation slabs for anticipated habitation, palm-trees now-dead, planted in orderly rows, dry fire hydrants, unused sewer lines. A transparent infrastructure. A desiccated dreamland for quixotic permanent vacationers. Anomalous zones are forever beautifully unsettled and unsettling. It's nighttime when I arrive and the air is foul and acrid. The glow of the nearly full moon reflects off the glittering salt. It's brighter here than at other places. And more corrosive. The salt crunches underfoot as I enter a portal to another mode of cognition. I understand this place. I savor being here. North 33° 17' 17.5", West 115° 58' 22.2". Eve Andrée Laramée |
