The L.A. River project: Resting and raging through histories of containment

The L.A. River is one of the most endangered rivers in the United States, stretching for 51 miles and almost entirely contained within a concrete channel [1]. Before the creation of this water freeway, the river was an epicenter of biodiversity. Historically, the river would blossom from a seasonal trickle to a fertile floodplain that nourished many riparian forest communities as well as the Indigenous Gabrieleno-Tongva Peoples [2]. Jumping forward through early colonialism—the river was once controlled by the King of Spain and then later diverted to feed the rapidly spreading agriculture of the empire—farming and industry began to define the L.A. area. The city exploded in density with people and infrastructure, and city planners did not seriously consider the flooding potentials of this major seasonal river. But rivers like this do not stay still, they meander.

In 1939, Los Angeles experienced a major tropical storm, the last to hit California before Tropical Storm Hilary of 2023 [3]. Rain pounded through the city, filling reservoirs, overflowing dams, and bringing widespread flooding. Nearly a hundred people died and much of the downtown area was destroyed by water. In response, the city began a decades-long feat of engineering to concretize and control the river. Water in L.A. was rendered a commodity, something to be extracted and managed by the city. With these industrial concrete interventions, unsurprisingly, many species disappeared [4].

To understand the unfolding species loss and its implications for the L.A. area, I began an ongoing artistic research project in the spring of 2021. Drawing on theory from quantitative ecology, biopolitics, and contemporary art, my research practice engages the multispecies entanglements of land and water across time. Focusing on the L.A. River, this project is part of my expanded practice for sustaining ecologies of care. By this, I refer to the slow and ongoing work of repair, which is conceptualized through a multiplicity of philosophical approaches that guide reparative engagements with the material world [5]. I was invited to join a group of genomic scientists through the CA environmental DNA (CALeDNA) project, who were working to sequence the DNA of the river [6]. From a drop of river water or soil, they can identify many of the species present (or passing through) and get a snapshot of the local biodiversity. These findings can then be expanded through measures of anthropogenic disturbances and biogeochemical cycling to build a mechanistic understanding of community composition [7]. Fourteen samples were collected at 143 sites along the L.A. watershed, with several hundred organisms identified at each collection. These data are publicly accessible in a map-based program through an online data explorer https://data.ucedna.com/samples.

Additionally, I met with various community groups to understand how they conceptualized the changing species of the river and spoke with the Friends of the L.A. River, neighborhood groups, Indigenous communities, museums, educators, city agencies, and researchers. People shared their personal experiences and the oral histories that connected them with different river species. For example, steelhead trout used to swim in the L.A. River and were an important food source for many. Now, non-native bass and carp (known locally as “sewer salmon”) are sometimes fished and eaten by unhoused residents who live near the river. In another story of shifting L.A. communities, the area known as Frogtown earned its nickname because people would find abundant “frogs” (which were actually toads) living in their yards, sleeping on cars, and hopping across sidewalks. From conversations like these, together with the eDNA results, I choose 7 species to feature that carry important river stories for L.A. communities, including the red willow tree, great blue heron, spirogyra algae, red-eared slider turtle, coyote, Western toad, and steelhead trout.

I worked with these species across multiple years to create a series of environmental sculptures and paintings. I considered the life worlds of the L.A. River through the lens of feminist scholar Mel Y. Chen’s theories on animacy. Chen writes that American culture has justified the genocide of different beings through an animacy hierarchy, which places value for lives along a human-centric hierarchy of sentience and supposed aliveness [8]. By consistently prioritizing industry, resource extraction, and the proliferation of consumer-focused settler family units and individual land ownership, connections to land, water, and nonhuman lives collapse. I further consider these ideas through Anna Tsing’s writing on the social lives of nonhumans as discussed in her essay More-Than-Human-Sociality. She invites us to consider how we can think with and pay better attention to those who communicate differently from humans across a spectrum of sensory experiences [9]. In response, I ask: How might we better sense and respond to the L.A. River’s unique multiplicity of forms? Which river stories are being prioritized as we continue to unfold in relation to each other and who is benefiting from those falsely constructed hierarchies? Taking an Indigenous, feminist, and queer theory approach to multispecies ontologies, Kim TallBear reminds us that Indigenous Peoples have not forgotten that nonhuman others such as rivers, stars, and thunder are agential beings with lives that are interrelated and co-constituted with humans [10]. Inspired by these theorists, diverse L.A. communities, and sentient river ecologies, I take a research-based, visual-arts approach to illuminate the complex multispecies becoming of the L.A. watershed. In weaving these multimedia stories, I aim to decenter human exceptionalism and contribute toward healing the series of violent breaks with the land that began with colonialism and have proliferated under capitalism.

For the sculptural pieces in Bio adornments for posthuman worldings (Figure 1), I partnered with the Kenneth S. Norris Center of Natural History and jeweler Savannah Hunter to source ethically collected specimens of my 7 chosen species, preserving them in a necklace of artist-created amber. The amber was interspersed with beads made from reformed L.A. River concrete as well as the sterling silver beads used in DNA extraction. This gesture functioned as a kind of analog DNA preservation, a critique of technofix science through prefabricated suspended animation for our potential dystopian future of rewilding extinct organisms from their saved DNA. The closed necklace loop references a water cycle, but also adornment—sacred, like prayer beads passed between generations. Jewelry is an intimate object that you wear closely against your skin, something that you will feel the weight of.

The necklace is suspended by an odd sculptural apparatus that conjures science aesthetics, jutting from a 3D concrete relief of the L.A. River watershed. With these forms, I am thinking about the ways in which we try to contain and manage nature and the lenses that we use to view it. How might a clinical and reductionist approach to understanding nature falsely situate us in relation to the natural world as something apart? What might we be losing by prioritizing the measurable as the foundation for the real?

While interviewing people about their relationships to the river, I also cocreated with the river, using a range of tools, both simple and complex, to produce critical cartographies of the watershed. Similarly to Clancy Wilmott’s situated alternative mappings [11], I am aiming to interweave tools and stories to create a more inclusive cartography. As part of this process, I produced numerous paintings sited at different river locations by pressing paper into the landscape surface and working materially with river water and pigments. These river meanderings are my response to local topographies and function as a form of artistic psychogeographic drifting. The pigment and water flows move in response to the changes in local topographies, and the colors are inspired by the color reflections in the river at each painted location. These paintings become a disassembled map of the potentials and actions of river water confined within the paper boundaries and hold an implied structure of the urban grid.

To illuminate the micro-topographies of the river, I coated the 7 specimens from the necklace in gold dust and visualized them at high resolution through scanning electron microscopy. Using decolonial geographic frameworks to conceptualize the river as body [12] and the previously described landscape surface painting approach, I wove the microscopic forms throughout the city gridlines of the 14-foot river painting, Resting and raging through histories of containment (Figure 2). The traces of thousands of species, their DNA, and their unique topographies evolved across millions of years in response to their environment. They are the river, the river is the coyote, the willow. Within the painting, these distorted and disappearing throughlines create a confusion of micro- and macro-topographies to join the various earth systems into a body. I offer this as an alternative mapping that hovers between the real and the speculative, past, present, and future. I consider how the traces of species past along with the violent and colonial beginnings of the Los Angeles River continue to haunt its waters. For this painting, I altered a map of the city to fit the body of the watershed, an inversion or gesture of repair for how the river has been warped by industry to fit the city.

As of 2024, the future of the L.A. River is the ongoing subject of major city planning discussions. Studies of current flood risks suggest that given the legacies of racist urban planning and ongoing climate change, dangerous flooding will disproportionately impact intentionally exploited and marginalized L.A. communities [13]. Massive urban sprawl has exacerbated these problems as there is very little unpaved ground where water can be absorbed.

Therein lies a potential solution to remove sections of concrete, expose absorbent wetlands, and rewild the river. Organizations like Friends of the L.A. River and Metabolic Studios have been undertaking large infrastructural research projects to experiment with effective flood management solutions that restore the fertile river while prioritizing environmental justice [14]. For the 18-year ecoart project, Bending the River (2005–present), researchers removed concrete to expose native wetlands and recycled wastewater that used to drain into the ocean. The clean water is now distributed to local parks with plans to channel water into homes and agricultural fields. Metabolic Studios is collaborating with communities to reimagine and propose scenarios of democratized and collectively managed waters, better flood control, and a greener city.

Practices of care from many different world views will be necessary to sustain human lives along with our nonhuman kin. The L.A. River project shared here is part of my long-term reparative work that crosses many disciplinary practices while also remaining grounded within the local community. To do this well requires seeking expanded views of who counts as community and how we can live in reciprocity together. By shifting the dominant Western ideology that a river exists as a resource to be managed and moving instead to an understanding of river as a unique site of knowledge production, we expand our ability to live well in multispecies communities. Perhaps through conceptualizing the river as body and by working with cultural bearers of traditional local knowledge, we can better curate the diversity of care practices that we will need for the water, the river, and the L.A. basin. Together, as we creatively vision these much-needed environmental interventions, we must also address the widening inequalities and systemic oppression within our communities. Environmental work can only be done well when systems of mutual aid and environmental justice are prioritized. The L.A. River provides the opportunity for a dynamic study of hydrocolonialism and active interspecies becoming where together we can find the stories and solutions that we need to make such practices of care possible.