The Land Guardians

Site Specific Video Installation

Felicitas Park, Escondido, California

2019

A video installation and live performance staged as a part of an outdoor art festival in the landscape surrounding Felicita Park, the historic home of the Kumeyaay Native American tribe in the Northern region of San Diego. The landscape features stones used for food grinding that date back over 2000 years. At present, the land is used as a recreational park for the upper class non-indigenous residents of the area. The video from this piece are vignettes from the landscape and sound recording of local wildlife, removing all traces of present day residents. The video installation was screened on a suspended piece of fabric panel wafting in the wind beside the river flowing through the park. The piece functions as a poetic honoring and remembering of the traces remaining of the people forcibly removed and erased from the landscape in the colonial westward expansion in the Southern California region. The live event also featured the presence of a shamanic practicioner who conducted a ritual to commune with the spirit of the river, the surrounding land, and to remember the past inhabitants. To honor the culturally sensitive nature of this ritual, no photographs were taken.

Made in collaboration with Jendi “Two Crows” Durrant

Commissioned for the festival GREY MATTER at ShipIntheWoods Gallery in Escondido, California.