Walk in Glassell Park #2 • 2017
I sought to share the layered experiences of place, time, and relationship in Glassell Park, where I spent a bulk of my early childhood through age ten and currently live again as an adult. Using the safe harbor of neighbor and childhood relationships as a navigation tool, I spoke with people whose past and present intertwined with my path about their own memories of place to express the spatial and emotional energies seen and unseen that are held in this intimate pocket of LA. Our individual experiences were combined to contribute to the route of a public walk that followed a routes I often take and stopping at places of significance. Some people I spoke with who were available joined us and all conversations were documented in an accompanying poetic essay. The walk was interpreted in Spanish by my neighbor, Cynthia Rodriguez.
This microhistory walk began at Elyria Canyon Park and was created in response to an invitation from independent curator Renée Reizman for her project The Streets Have No Name For Us, a series of walks and essays by four women to examine how women navigate urban spaces in contrast to the flâneur trope of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin in the early 20th century.
