It has been said that Los Angeles is a city that erases its past. Through a number of proposals to preserve our present for the future, Maarten Vanden Eynde asks what that erasure means for the way that Los Angeles reproduces and projects an image and history of itself, both in the greater contemporary global culture and in the future that the city sees for itself.
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diorama nativa, National History Museum Los Angeles, 2007
Excavating the future
‘America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation’ — Oscar Wilde
How will the present be remembered in the future? How do you make history visible? Three years ago Maarten Vanden Eynde started his Genetologic Research project, an investigation into what he describes as the future past. Genetology is a self invented ‘science of first things’, created in opposition to the actually existing science of last things, or eschatology. Genetology’s main area of research is our fascination with time and its consequences: How will we look back to the past in the future? What will be left over from the present?
The themes of time, memory, past and future have special resonance in the history of Los Angeles, where the drive to construct and remember history has been accompanied by an equally strong urge to erase and forget the past. On the 1st of August 1769, only a few years before the independence war of the United States, the first expedition under supervision of the Spaniard Gaspas de Portola reached an Indian village called Yang-na. The next day, which was coincidentally the celebration of the holy mother queen of the Angels (in Spanish: Nuestra Seņora la Reina de los Angeles), the village was officially called Los Angeles. As the capital of a Mexican province it was the last state that was conquered by the United States in 1847. As a kind of bottleneck between North and South America, California became a last refuge for many native Americans. Today, the majority of the US’s Native Americans live in the state of California: 627.562 to be precise on a total of 35.000.000 inhabitants. This is twice as much as Arizona, the state with the second largest number of native Americans. In Los Angeles itself, however, their presence is almost unnoticed. Most native Americans live together in reservations around the city and the old Indian village Yang-na is covered with endless layers of concrete and asphalt, leaving nothing to remember. The city is in a state of constant flux, sprawling, growing, building and destroying at an equal pace. The effect is, as historian of Los Angeles Norman Klein wrote, that ‘virtually no ethnic community downtown was allowed to keep its original location: Chinatown, the Mexican Sonora, Little Italy […]. In 1930, 20,000 people resided in the four blocks around Olvera Street. Now only a few hundred live there.’1. Like a prelude to a future city without a past, Los Angeles is constantly erasing its own memory.
How will we remember Los Angeles if it doesn’t remember itself? To investigate possible representations of the present for a future history, Vanden Eynde wants to start a search for physical objects, remnants of the past in the present. He will make a small presentation of several items (including artworks of different artists) to create a possible view of the future past of Los Angeles. By imagining a future in which only a few objects and images are left to represent Los Angeles, he wants to give it a past. It draws on Vanden Eynde’s subjective archive of the city, thus creating a new associative history. Together with the Los Angeles Museum of Jurassic Technology 2. he will look for possible ways to present the artefacts, thereby exploring forms and practices of historical preservation.
Inland Empire, 2007
Casino Morongo, Morongo National Reservation, 2007
1.
Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting. Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, 1997,p. 1
2.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic. It has a wide variaty of curiosity objects and explanations for (un)natural phenomena.