Martin Luther King Blvd, Riverside, Ca

3/28/20, 9;09 am

“While writers, newscasters, filmmakers and songwriters have discovered a rather fascinating California of the imagination, ordinary, and often very poor, working people have assemble the material constituents of the state out of which the erratic imagination can do its work.”

-Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land

Landscape, as Don Mitchell theorizes, has multilayered meanings: it is an image representing a view, the frame and art of displaying that view, the human and nonhuman land formations of a site, a “way of seeing,” and finally the totality of a space capable of being fully seen and comprehended in a single frame (2). Further, landscape, is simultaneously a productive work of art and toil, but its existence as a site and production of labor also renders it as work to be erased from view, so as to appear natural, unworked, pure and unstained by human toil. Mitchell helps us to understand landscape as “a social relation of labor, even as it is something that is labored over,” leading towards a need to examine the historic labor of a landscape in order to fully realize its geography (6-7).  This geography, we must be clear, is a structure of labor where earth holds people who “work and live and sleep, eat, make love, and struggle over the conditions of their existence” (Mitchell 2). It is this ontological struggle that forces the geographer to consider the labor landscape necessitates. But to arrive at a complex and full examination of this labor, Mitchell posits landscape must be approached through three epistemological approaches: art-historical, which addresses the meaning and function of place representations as illustrations of and structuring of social relations; cultural and historical geography, which examines the morphology of geographies and how the social relations of landscapes follow its historic form; and labor history, which realizes the only way to intimately know a landscape is through the history of its working class and attention to its circular structure of social relations (3). Through this tertiary approach, we are able to interrogate the spatiality of a landscape’s society, leading to a deeper critique of capitalist and colonial power structures that create the referent geographies. From here we may ask, why does the landscape look this way?

In studying the California landscape, I am continuously curious about the ontological struggle inherent in the landscape. How does the earth hold, represent, and structure the struggle of people to “work and live and sleep, eat, make love, and struggle over the conditions of their existence” (Mitchell 2)? Particularly, where can we find collective acts, representations of ontological struggle in the landscape? Collective displays of grief? Of mourning? Communal acts of love? Of fear? Art historian W.J.T. Mitchell posits “landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture,” which forces me to ask at what point does culture intercede, or perhaps, even greater, where in the landscape can we identify the ontological struggle, the interruption of culture—and once identified, what does it represent (qtd in Mitchell 2). If earth holds space for human and nonhuman productions and ways of seeing, if earth is where we create and toil, where we socialize and struggle—what may we learn by curiously turning our eyes to the landscape, searching for ontological struggle, for evidence of the work, the interruption of culture? We may push our curiosity of the landscape in new directions, inquiring why the landscape looks as it does, but also, why does it feel as it does.

What follows is a visual investigation of the historic, global pandemic event that is curiously, I hope, searching for the ontological struggle of people in the landscape. The project started as a curiosity about the need for people to create and maintain roadside memorials. As an adjunct, I spent many hours driving from campuses, and often spotted roadside displays of grief and mourning. At first, I would daydream at stop lights, wondering about the life and people behind the displays—who was lost, by whom, when, how, and why? Soon, those questions morphed into questions about the production of those displays, and what, perhaps, did they represent for their creators; particularly, what did they say about the earth’s capacity to hold, represent, and structure the collective grief and mourning of its inhabitants. This curiosity was interrupted by Covid-19, when I was forced, like many other Californians to shelter in place. Like many, I had to venture out to locate food, and when I met the new landscape, the new realities of my community, the land had morphed. Mitchell pushes us to acknowledge landscapes as a “produced space,”and reminds us that “for all the importance of ideological, representational aspects of the idea of landscape, we need also to remember the geographical sense of landscape: the morphology of a place is in its own right a space that makes social relations”(6).  Essentially, humanity always already creates and transmutes the landscape so that landscape is the representation of land and life, or the ontological struggles of people within both natural and manmade spaces. Of course, as Mitchell keenly points out, land and life includes labor, “the work that people do of necessity”(6). But, what happens to the landscape when most work ceases? What happens when labor is silenced? Moreso, who continues to labor, in a pandemic, and what happens to our shared spaces. How, collectively, do we morph the landscape with public displays of fear, panic, and grief?

During my experiences in a pandemic landscape, my interest in the production needed to create and produce the landscape turned into curiosity about the feeling of the landscape? Where might we locate and observe ontological struggles of fear, cultures of panic in the landscape—predominantly manmade (supermarkets, strip malls, grocery stores), for natural landscapes (beaches, hiking trails, etc.) were closed. My trips out, which were themselves practices of immense caution and fear—face masks, gloves, polite dances of starts and stops to allow others to move with six feet distance—became opportunities to observe scenes, manmade landscapes, of ontological struggle—how were/are people living—eating, sleeping, making love—in the midst of global pandemic. These were commercial scenes of needs—grocery stores, and wants—greeting card shop, intercepted by culture, by law, by a global, human act and will to survive.

As Covid-19 is not a singular event, but an ongoing shift in how we live, there is no immediate answer. My goal today is not to identify a finite answer—it is impossible, we are still living and identifying a new normal. Instead, my goal here is to begin the curious process of witnessing, providing space, observing the interception the displays of humanity on the landscape during a global, historic event. My goal is to be witness, and in so, providing space and work to one day arrive at a deeper understanding of the human act of ontological struggle written in the land. Where Mitchell searches for answers to why the land look as it does, I continue, searching for answers to why the land feels, sounds as it does. I am after the displays of life—the work, life, sleep, eat, making love—written into the landscape, hoping to discover the ways earth holds people, cultures. I am after the joining of land and life, hoping to trace the moment culture intercedes on earth, or earth intercedes on culture.

Finally, a note on method: All photos were taken on my iPhone XS camera. First, this decision was a matter of access and availability, it is the camera I always have with me. But, most important, the iPhone’s small and discreet size in comparison to my larger, digital SLR became a necessity as I soon learned cooperations do not allow photography within their stores, and people are often intimidated by large cameras taking pictures of them in public. I would also like to mention, that during my photographic observations I worked to strike a balance between photographing those without permanent dwellings and allowing them privacy. My goal was and is never to violate their privacy, yet also capture their condition, which I believe needs voice and representation. I worked in all my photographs to capture their presence in the landscape, while protecting their right to privacy.

-Kiandra Jimenez, 5/2020

Mitchell, Don. The Lie of the Land. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.