David de Rozas: MAYBE WE ARE ALL ABANDONED BUILDINGS, JUST WAITING TO BE PULLED
April 21 - June 11, 2023
Opening Reception Friday, April 21, 6pm
Informal Exhibition Talk, 7pm
FREE
Related Event: Alamo Drafthouse screening of 3 short films by David de Rozas
Wednesday, April 19, 7:30pm
Cost: $10
Please join us for an opening reception and artist talk by filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist David de Rozas at CO-OPt Research + Projects on Friday, April 21 at 6pm.
Even though downtown Los Angeles only represents 1% of the city’s land, the current
‘DTLA 2040’ proposed plan projects the building of an additional 70,000 housing units and a rezoning of the entire area. This economic ‘growth machine,’ urban boom, and the influx of wealthy new inhabitants have resulted in the racialized displacement of long-term, low- and deeply low-income residents and family businesses. The current transformations reproduce downtown Los Angeles’s historical sense of itself as a space of continual erasure that can always be re-marketed as a ‘renaissance.’ In a moment when California is on the verge of becoming the world’s fourth-largest economy, the creation of wealth also generates dispossession and poverty.
As the ‘DTLA 2040’ plan aims to complete a new spatial re-writing of the city, downtown Los Angeles functions as a locus, but simultaneously as a lacuna; a narrative where the erasure of memory and history is materialized as a place structured around past-present absences, hidden experiences, and repressed bodies. Yet, even as downtown leaps toward its future, it cannot escape a constellation of radical connections and disconnections, frictions between history and memory, selective conservations and disappearances, and negotiations of class, race, and gender that are currently enacting themselves on its narrative structures. The works that comprise MAYBE WE ARE ALL ABANDONED BUILDINGS, JUST WAITING TO BE PULLED seek to critically articulate these dissonances and multiple layers of reality by speculating with archival materials as potential tools to unflatten and mobilize downtown Los Angeles’ haunting urban environment and the traces of its historical erasures.
MAYBE WE ARE ALL ABANDONED BUILDINGS, JUST WAITING TO BE PULLED
It’s said that on September 4th, 1781 Spaniards named a small settlement ‘El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles del Rio Porciuncula’, established near ‘Yaanga’, the largest and most influential Tongva village in the region. The new town’s government encompassed a process of native land administration and distribution for the initial eleven settler families.
The settlement grew. Apparently, of the eleven original families, three were forced to leave “for being useless to themselves and the town”. Soldiers came. A church and a jail were built. More settlers arrived and were given titles to their land. The persisting Yaanga’ Tongva community that wasn’t slaved or forced into labor, was pushed to new locations until they were evicted from their last village when this land was purchased by a French immigrant.
Both the native village Yaanga, and the Spanish settlement's original location remain contested after river floods destroyed them at least twice in the area known today as downtown Los Angeles.
The actual ‘DTLA 2040’ proposed city plan outlines the entire rezoning of downtown Los Angeles and a new building code. Despite Downtown Los Angeles representing 1% of the city’s land, it is projected to hold 20% of its expected population growth with the building of 70,000 additional housing units. In the present, “Downtown LA is constantly evolving with dozens of new buildings in varying stages of completion. From soaring new residential towers to cutting-edge industrial conversions, DTLA is experiencing a phenomenal wave of development”. In contemporary urban politics, ‘conversions and development waves’ have also become global synonyms for attracting higher-income populations, gentrification, and racialized displacement. The creation of wealth also generates dispossession, poverty, and death.
Downtown neighborhoods that have not yet fully developed still host, long-term low- and deeply low-income residents, family businesses, and the largest unhoused population in California. Last decade's 65% rent increase in both living and retail properties has culminated in a metropolitan landscape populated with a wide range of ‘BUSINESS CLOSED’, ‘FOR LEASE’, ‘SALE’, ‘CLEARANCE’, or ‘GOING OUT OF BUSINESS’ signs. I see these signals as future memories of the individual stories gone missing as the DTLA 2040 plan completes the new spatial rewriting of the city. Perhaps, to begin with, some lives were never legible to be part of Los Angeles metropolitan area narrative: the mission system, jails, and a slave market; spatial planning and land privatization; redlining and residential segregation; the original Chinatown, Bunker Hill, or Chávez Ravine erased neighborhoods; the concretized river; and most recently the real estate affluent ‘luxury condos’ and ‘creative spaces’ impulse. I wonder what downtown Los Angeles would look like in 2040.
November 2021. Downtown’s landscape feels and thinks in both presence and vanishing terms. Bijan hangs a handwritten sign after closing his L.A SUPERSTAR electronics shop at 528 S Broadway. It reads in capital letters: “MAYBE WE ARE ALL EMPTY BUILDINGS, JUST WAITING TO BE PULLED”. Six months after, his sign still hangs on the 1910s theater marquee that once hosts moviegoers, later his shop, and currently something to come. I think of Bijan’s sign as an ominous reminder of the archival impulse for the remaining family business operating in the area. A few blocks away, an Apple store recently opened in another historical theatre. Time is melting in downtown LA.
The current transformations reproduce downtown Los Angeles’s historical sense of itself as a space of continual erasure that can always be re-marketed as a ‘renaissance.’ As the ‘DTLA 2040’ plan aims to complete a new spatial re-writing of the city, downtown functions as a locus, but simultaneously as a lacuna; a narrative where the erasure of memory and history is materialized as a place structured around absences, hidden experiences, and repressed bodies. Yet, even as downtown leaps toward its future, it cannot escape a constellation of radical connections and disconnections, frictions between history and memory, selective conservations and disappearances, and negotiations of class, race, and gender that are currently enacting themselves on its narrative structures. This ongoing research-based project seeks to critically articulate these dissonances and multiple layers of reality using film and new media as critical methods and potential tools to unflatten and mobilize downtown Los Angeles’ liberatory energies.
Friday, June 17th, 2011. I arrived at LAX airport as an immigrant pursuing new opportunities through education. I visited Downtown that month. The core of the city was starting another of its own, but late, transformations. I experience a Downtown where the past, present, and future of the city were, and still, physically colliding amid future and oblivion. At that time, I heard people in the city hate Downtown. I always loved it. It was the only part of Los Angeles that resonates with a vague fluid idea of ‘home’ that persists in me after having a split identity between places and cultures. I have been living here since. I heard that as immigrants, we are forced to connect with the question of memory; with the ruin, the ghosts, and the intangible. Perhaps this is how we try to connect with the place; locating ourselves in the culture as a way to legitimize our practice in the present.
About the artist:
David de Rozas (b.1979) is a filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, and educator based in Los Angeles, California. His recent work critically explores how memory practices invoke real or imagined places, spaces, documents, or events, to manifest plural ways of knowing, experiencing, and being. His films have been screened in festivals and film-curated series worldwide, such as Visions du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, True/False, or Kassel DocFest. He directed and produced GIVE (2018), winning seven international awards, including Best Short Documentary at FullFrame and Best Experimental at the Smithsonian African American Film Festival. The film was nationally broadcasted on P.O.V. and nominated for an Emmy under the Documentary Outstanding New Approaches category in 2019. His most recent project, The Blessings of the Mystery (2021), a collaboration with visual artist Carolina Caycedo and Juan Mancias, chairman of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, inquires into Far West Texas’ colonial and extractivist economies through native people's cosmological consciousness and resistance against ongoing forms of erasure and exploitation. This interdisciplinary exhibition premiered at The University of Texas Visual Arts Center in Austin in 2021, was on view at NY MoMA, and it will be on display at UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences under the Visualizing Abolition initiative in 2023. The Blessings of the Mystery was featured at the Guggenheim Museum's The World Around public program and led to an Artist in Residency award at Headlands Center for the Arts in 2021. David de Rozas is pursuing a Media Arts and Practice doctoral program at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.