Astral Projections is a series of works that navigates through trauma of the everyday, and in particular the potentials and failures of grieving bodies in relation to unperceived traumatic events. The project works through ways unrecognized or unspoken traumas become coded, felt out, discovered, and moved through in familiar movements, images, and architectures over time. These Astral Projections together are intended to reflect a psychological ground that includes interior spaces such as daydreaming, unintelligible sounds, movement without destination, escape, alternate universes, and overlapping cognitive experiences of time and memory. This work connects to movement across ground that does not require cartography or borders, but is always limited by actual political geographies and architectures. Astral Projections is a continuing work in progress, and there are more parts yet to be realized.
Astral Projections: Yaanga and the not yet
Yaanga and the Not Yet engages with how complexities of interiority interacts with and produces external worlds constrained by location, in particular the rigidity and politics of built space. The physical and visual space of the project is created to regain sensory pleasures that everyday trauma limits or represses. This work engages with the collision of parallel histories – a collapsing of different perceptions of place and time through the navigation and movement through the land and physical materials of Yaanga/Los Angeles. Yaanga is the Tongva name for the area that is also called the city of Los Angeles.
The framework for the material aspects of this work is rooted in the complexities of the local shifting populations of California, acknowledging indigenous geographies, and the need for nongeographic psychological spaces for physical bodies. A wall was torn apart. Beach sand and shells were collected from the California coast and poured inside the partially torn down wall. Dirt and plants were collected from along the border of Seal Beach military land. The breakage along the wall is a representation of the skyline of Los Angeles as seen from downtown. Two videos are from locations that are on the edges the Yaanga/Los Angeles area, and the third is a video taken while driving local freeways in an altered state of mind. The red boxes are intended to be anti-architectures, with the potential to be moved, shifted, interacted with, and become flexible structures.
Yaanga and the not yet was exhibited at the Armory in the Mexicali Bienniel – Calafia: Manifesting the Terestrial Paradise curated by Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, and Daniela Lieja Quintanar
Installation Photo Credit: Ian Byers-Gamber
Astral Projections: A Hole In my Knee
A Hole in My Knee is a video installation that faces a corner in a dimly lit space. Only one person can view the video at a time, with the light of the video washing over them in different colors. The video consists of a series of saturated scenes paired with videos floors and corners. The saturated videos were created from people around the world attempting to capture sounds of an unknown origin and posted on Youtube. The sounds from mysterious origins are often understood as otherworldly or alien, and are experienced as faraway and unattached to any particular human or natural event. This video production is a shared global activity of the inability to perceive and locate sounds with vision and video capturing devices.
40 minute video loop
A Hole In My Knee Video Excerpt:
Astral Projections: Publication
more images to be posted soon on this aspect of the project…..
This publication considers ways that mundane states of grief become coded in the act of looking, moving through the world, and documented by vernacular photography. The publication contains a series of printed cell phone photographs, reproduced emails used to communicate passing moments, and a writing printed on the inside of the cover. This publication is printed by risograph and xerography.
Made in collaboration with Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) 2017. With a special thanks to Cal Tabuena-Frolli, Hailey Loman, and Garrett Hallman for essential production support, direction, and thoughts.
Kim Zumpfe 