Live from the Frontline: Colton & Fontana
In collaboration with community archivists A People’s History of the I.E., I co-wrote a grant for Live from the Frontline; a participatory public memory project inviting artists into the archives and the landscapes of logistics to create site-specific works that explore the roots of environmental racism. The project includes eight sites located in Riverside and San Bernardino where long histories of colonialism and extraction from the land and labor are palpable, offering opportunities to reflect on “the slow violence of the supply chain.” For this project, I led a team of artists to create works at 5 sites in San Bernardino, Bloomington, Colton, and Fontana.
Site Exhibition: Solo show at the California Museum of Photography, June-October, 2024
Fontana
The 880 acre mill site Henry Kaiser once built to manufacture steel for WWII shipyards went bankrupt in 1983, leaving a toxic ruin in its wake. Prologis, a warehouse developer, began cleaning up the land in the mid 2000s, repurposing lots to make way for warehouse sprawl. Through aerial and still photographs, I traced this imprint left by Kaiser and the deserted company town at Eagle Mountain, as if to warn us of what could happen again if the supply chain continues to expand without accountability.
Colton
Mt. Slover, or what the local Cahuilla call The Hill of Ravens, was once a tall mountain filled with limestone. After over a century of mining, it is now just a leveled mound. I returned to the mountain to photograph after local artists Sant Khalsa and Lewis De Soto, but found only a leveled platform with shipping containers stacked to the sky and warning signs of cancerous dust. Mining archives of the cement and rail industries’ use of land brought greater context to why life in Colton has been so hard for the generations who stayed behind.