Astral Projections is a continuing series of works that navigates through trauma of the everyday, and in particular the potentials and failures of the undirected actions in relation to grieving bodies . The project works through ways the unrecognized or unspoken become coded, felt out, discovered, and moved through in familiar actions and architectures. These Astral Projections are intended to reflect a psychological ground where the interior overlap with the exterior such as daydreaming, unintelligible sounds, gazing into nowhere, movements without destination. These have the potential to breach our rational sense of reality and embodiment and reach into alternate universes and overlapped cognitive and collective experiences of body and out-of-timeness. 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 several works yet to be realized. The project continues to grow, and I hope to put these works into the world sometime!!
Astral Projections: Yaanga and the not yet
Yaanga and the Not Yet 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 in the partially torn-down 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.
This work engages with how complexities of interiority interacts with and produces external worlds, even if constrained by location, in particular the rigidity and politics of built space. Through a potentially moving and transforming installation space, the physical and visual space of the project is created to regain sensory pleasures that everyday trauma might limit or repress.
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. The corners are places that one’s gaze might drift when “not looking” and experiencing a more internal state.
40 minute video loop
A Hole In My Knee Video Excerpt:
Astral Projections: Publication
This publication considers ways that mundane states of loss might become coded in the act of mediated looking and writing. Vernacular photography is used to capture a state of peering into the world with a camera to capture and retain passing internal moments of emotion. The emails are written communications during the making of this project, with redactions as acts of removal regarding content that might reveal something.. The experimental writing on the inside of the cover is created from passing thoughts written down while waiting in my car, deciding whether or not to join social events, reflecting on how overlaps of time, language, and memory from youth to adulthood form desire and destruction that is equally internal and for an audience to witness from
The publication contains a series of printed cell phone photographs, reproduced emails, and a writing printed on the inside of the cover. The cover of the publication is printed by risograph and the internal photographs and text is printed by xerography.
Risograph and assembly done 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 