Last spring I was asked by Linda Pollack to join her upcoming new journey. I had little knowledge about her work and as she proceeded with explaining it to me, I started pondering her words, and finding more and more intriguing the idea of visualizing all the words she was going to collect, all these thoughts that would be expressed only in words and thus far recorded only with videos. I started to think about the possibility of MAPPING the collective visions she intended to explore every week. The physicality of the mapping would then allow Linda, at the end of the show, to perhaps transcribe this layered and temporal exercise into something different— to articulate it and make it evolve into a body of work that could become something else, one day.

My role since then has been not only to visualize that idea–to make it “concrete” within the walls of the large gallery at 7th+FIG–but also to facilitate and ARTICULATE the different voices that Linda started to collect in order to create this big machine role. Skype conference call after conference call, we started delineating all our desires to record, using all our senses, the pluralisms of experiences and conversations happening every week within and around the LOUNGE. Katie Bachler was added to our team, and with her enthusiasm, she guided weekly groups in the discovery of the Los Angeles cityscape, and then brought them back to the gallery where they would articulate their discoveries in a cognitive mapping exercise. Over time, more and more groups have come by, presented their work, thoughts, sketches, desires, and exhibited their artifacts and left them there, on the walls, for others to see. 

The civic dialogue, as Linda introduced it to me, became for me a form of expressing the pluralisms of downtown Los Angeles, a place made by many non-coherent groups (in the best sense of the word!). And from this, my desire grew to give it even more voice, to articulate this un-structured (=pluralistic) vision into a collective and layered one that would ultimately be able to SYNTHESIZE, amplify, and memorize. Thus, we sought to create a vision for downtown by the accumulation of a plurality of visions, inviting the different groups to say how they live/work/play/study in downtown and not only through words and discussion, but also by drawing, annotating, and sketching it—activating and cultivating the debate by letting it imprint its memory onto the walls of the gallery.

The gallery has now, finally, become a PLACE where layers of artifacts, notes, and thoughts have accumulated and where it is possible for Linda, and us all, to look at it, ponder again, and finally say: “What’s next?!”

In collaboration with Habeas Lounge, Linda Pollack