Feeling Fields

2024

30”x40”

Looped video projection on woven and architectural scale-crochet fiber installation.

Cotton, copper, and wool.

This installation ponders the numerous ways that state-led infrastructural projects throw materials into patterns of unknowability.

Anthropologists such as Vasilina Orlova and Lauren Berlant understand infrastructure as matter that makes possible and impossible certain public feelings. Infrastructure facilitates the circulation of people and affect. In this sense, infrastructure can be a materialization of the emotional textures of histories and the contemporary.

The channelization of Southern California rivers has been a crucial aspect of the numerous waves of settler-colonization in the region. Major transportation pathways, such as freeway systems and the pathways of channelized streams, follow Indigenous footpaths that were later used to create trails for colonial expeditions such as that of Juan Bautista de Anza.

To complete infrastructural projects, materials such as concrete, steel, and copper are exported and imported through neoliberal trade networks. Removed from the soil, these materials and their genealogies of extraction are erased in favor of the monumental promise offered by infrastructure: Southern California. In turn, these materials become “naturalized” into landscapes, and are seldom viewed as sites of inquiry, investigation, and feeling. What is special, generative, or emotional about a pipe in the mountain?

This installation accounts for the everyday affective textures of infrastructural projects. Rather than understanding infrastructure for its technical promises, I explore the emotional promise and possibility of channelized water networks in Southern California. Emotional elements are woven into a series of installed tapestries, strung together with critical materials, and dreams of regenerative alterity are projected onto this texture. Warp and weft become done and undone.