Import Export presents "Chapter 1: California pilled" from The Alluvials by Alice Bucknell as part of Basel Social Club 2024.
The Alluvials is a is a video work that explores the politics of drought and water scarcity in Los Angeles. The story is told through numerous perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore called El Aliso, and the ghost of the city’s celebrity mountain lion, P-22. The Alluvials film employs various media: custom-built game environments, “modded” versions of the fictional city of Los Santos from Grand Theft Auto V, 3D scans of LA the artist captured by drone, AI “hallucinations”merging historical images of the River with future development proposals, and visualizations of GIS datasets/pollution data of the LA River. Acknowledging Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the Tongva People of the Greater Los Angeles Basin, the project underscores that nature is an intelligent system, a technology in its own right.
