Therapeutic Water
Length: 5:12 RGB Color 720P 635MB MP4 2021
Chinatown (©Paramount Pictures, 1974)
Huell Howser Archives (©Chapman University, Leatherby Libraries)
The L.A. River: Nature Tamed (©J. Paul Getty Trust, 2013)
Photos and video: ©Prelinger Archives; Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection;
UCLA Urban Simulation Team; USC Libraries; ©Mulholland-Scattergood Virtual Museum
Tracks: Evil N***** (Julius Eastman ©Music Sales Corporation) Says (Nils Frahm ©UMG, [Merlin] IDOL Distribution)
This is Water (David Foster Wallace, Commencement Speech Kenyon College, 2005)
Life and water birth each other. Water sustains life, water flows sustain growth, life finds resolution in water. In California, forty of the fifty largest lakes are human made reservoirs, and each one flooded indigenous land. The source of water in Los Angeles is not dissimilar, fought over in the water wars of the Owens Valley that followed the dispossession of the Paiute natives. Water is also the power to give and take life. The 51 miles of what’s left of the once torrential Los Angeles River is a stunning spectacle of nature thwarted by development. The city is unique in turning away from its river in the words of Jennifer West. Now mostly off-limits, contaminated, guarded, and policed, save for the rare moments when life refuses to disappear, the LA River is a giant example of constructed human infrastructure that has also been largely forgotten. This five minute twelve second video essay is inspired by the legacy of video artists and movements including Harun Farocki, James Benning, Hito Steyerl, Dogme95, the Karrabing Film Collective, and the Black Audio Film Collective. Combining original images and footage with found and archival images and footage, the video presents an aleatory order and deliberately constructed language that operate as forms of interrogation and juxtaposition. It also takes inspiration from Ana Tsing’s explication of the concept of polyphony and its importance to interrupting the webs of capital and power. For Tsing, the concept of polyphony is a practice in listening and observation that forces the observer to pick out separate melodies playing at their own rhythms, simultaneously. To collapse the unidirectional linearity of time is both a critical practice and a suggestion of the possibilities of difference.
Jordan
Under the yoke of our mornings
the sun crumbles
and in the darkness of our steps
our panting breath is on fire
these incomplete homelands
in which we appear to be
nothing more than prisoners of war
Ibrahim Nasrallah, Homeland
Length: 1:47 by Samine Joudat 2021.
Track: Forest Glade (Oliver Patrice Weder)
Portraits From A Mad Heart
An artists’ book created by Samine Joudat, printed edition of 50. 2019.
The Wire Still Haunts Us
Presented at Transformations of the Human (ToftH) in Berkeley, Ca
Length: 1:17 by Samine Joudat 2022.
Track: The Son of Flynn (Daft Punk)
The Wire Still Haunts Us