i agree that the site /non site dialectic is fictive and performative. and that this method points
to a 'REAL' that you can't see, or that is implied outside the scope or gaze of media. You can't see the topography of trauma, it's not possible to make an image of it. So the construction of the non site is made alongside or next to that thing we cannot represent. (An)architecture as Gordon prefigured. I sense the nearness or approach of the pain of the disaster (in the case of La Conchita, is ongoing because they never know when another debris flow will occur, and many residents can't or choose not to leave for a lot of compelling reasons). Entering the world of the disaster site means not being able to "sight" it, I mean, you can't really see it in its entirety because al you are in is the fragment of shattered time inside the ruin...so many pieces of what's important to 'understand' or apprehend (grasp) the whole are missing. Currently the condition at La Conchita is one of evacuation, in so far as the people of La Conchita have lost control over the construction of the sense of place, the identity of place, as this formation is now in the mass media imaginary. They wont talk to journalists because they feel that the news media only want to exploit the disaster. On the other hand, some people there have asked me to film a propaganda documentary that will help prove that somebody (the country, the avocado growers on the ridge top) has caused the disaster at La Conchita. They want PR. So that's also impossible for me. It's up to them to reclaim and lay hold to their identity of place. In order to prevent just adding to the superfluity of images 'about '
the disaster, I am taking a path of moving through the site as it were from this blind or sidereal condition; I can only create a fictive non site about something that is real but without an image, the terrible suffering there. Doing this requires me not taking on an authoritative relationship to the site as a photographer or video artist; i am not authoring in the site to make a representation of it, as this only adds to the media glut, pointlessly. it's so easy to turn away from the image of disaster.

www.christinamcphee.net
www.strikeslip.tv
www.naxsmash.net

For Agamben, ‘bare life’ is exposed by the actions of democratic states, as they suspend their own rule of law, in the name of war against terrorism. The state itself has declared a suspension of its own rule of law in the name of a state of exception, in a status of permanent emergency. I have felt that an analog condition plays itself out at La Conchita. People there have to live in a permanent state of emergency. Nothing is happening to ‘fix’ the geologic landscape: some think that it can be fixed, that it is the fault of government or the avocado growers. Actually though there’s no way that the site is ever going to be safe. Yet people persist in living there. They endure this suspension of ordinary life by living in ‘bare life’ and at the same time they try to forget about the pain in order to go on living everyday life. So what I wonder about is how there could an analogy in to the state of exception Agamben describes. It would appear, so far, that government services are not available to clean up the site or to help people move elsewhere. They cannot leave. They cannot sell their houses. They are stranded. The hope of a continuing social contract, between the state and the citizens, that in times of disaster, we can expect some disaster relief, flies in the face of the evidence that this landscape, at any rate, is not going to get help. And what has happened here can happen to many coastal towns in many places around the world, with the advent of rapid climate change in combination with geologically generative and inherently unstable forces. Victims of disaster try to get on with their lives. I feel like I am like them, both in pain and ‘checked out’’. Simultaneously anaesthetized against pain by the surface paradise of southern California, and in shock from the pain. When I shoot photographs, it’s always inevitable to anticipate and then to confront, at the turn of a corner, down the long view of an alley, the shock of the slide. It persists. When Ventura County put up an ineffectual chain link and ‘keep out’ / ‘danger’ signs around the mudslide, within a few days after January 10, La Conchita residents quickly retaliated. They breached the fence and set up a sprinkler system so that they could make a memorial banana garden on top of the slide. The rebellion but also the chain link itself bears witness to a breakdown of the relationship of trust that underpins the rule of law. La Conchita is not viable, never will be viable, never will be safe, indeed it is hazardous on even days of moderate rain. La Conchita flies in the face of the California dream of paradise living. Or maybe paradise is off the edge, in a bare life zone where the future doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe the only thing that matters is the presence of the dead. The people of La Conchita are defiant towards the perceived indifference of government. I wonder if they sense that the state may never help them and that their gestures to get media attention are just a way of branding their disaster. Landscape of trauma is another media moment. It recalls Bjork’s song: “State of emergency/ that’s where I want to be/” I feel like I too am implicated in this breakdown. I can’t help them either. Or can I?

excerpt/ to read more: "Bare Life and the Traumatic Landscape" an interview with Amy Wiley, http://virose.pt locative media issue summer 2006

"A memorial is another type of double experience, like the traumatic memory. It is a spatial representation of a moment of absence, and, it echoes with that sense of meaning at a distance, at a remove but itself does not produce meaning Memorials mimic the process of creating meaning, but there is no meaning because there is nothing there in the place of trauma. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial turns black walls into sites of concentrated emotion, doesn’t compensate for the loss, and doesn’t put it into any meaningful structure because you cannot justify that loss. Her design instantiates the experience of pain and violent loss but under cover of a meaning that isn’t." --Amy Wiley

http://www.virose.pt locative media projects July 2006

Maya Lin: http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Vietnam_Veterans_Memorial.html

" . . . this memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember.

"It was while I was at the site that I designed it. I just sort of visualized it. It just popped into my head. Some people were playing Frisbee. It was a beautiful park. I didn't want to destroy a living park. You use the landscape. You don't fight with it. You absorb the landscape . . . When I looked at the site I just knew I wanted something horizontal that took you in, that made you feel safe within the park, yet at the same time reminding you of the dead. So I just imagined opening up the earth. . . ."

Maya Lin in an interview with Washington Post writer Phil McCombs in Brent Ashabranner and Photographs by Jennifer Ashabranner. Always to Remember, the Story of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, p. 42.

"I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it."

"Andy (Maya Lin's Yale critic) said, you have to make the angle mean something. And I wanted the names in chronological order because to hone the living as well as the dead it had to be a sequence in time."

Maya Lin, quoted in Robert Campbell, "An Emotive Place Apart," A.I.A. Journal, May 1983, p. 151.