Topographic Works:
Los Angeles River
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Topographic Works: Los Angeles River
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The Los Angeles River has travelled many courses over time, often wreaking havoc on the young city when she did. Scacco’s investigation of the river echoes not only an investigation into personal history, but also a wider cultural investigation into our lived environments.

Each hand drawing begins with an iteration (present or historic) of the path of the Los Angeles River. It then traces her shape, each line emanating out solely from the last, to create a familiar and navigable topography from an unknown present landscape. The mirrored surface reflects its surroundings. Continually influenced and interrupted by its environment, the viewer is often the most noticeable interruption in the current.

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"Every map is a fiction."
DJ Waldie, Holy Land

Everything is a line; every boundary, every bridge, every river. We take lines for granted. We walk on them, drive on them, fly across them, travel through them, stay within them, are kept out of them. We are led to believe these lines are immovable. We are led to be believe we exist on the right side of the line. We are trained to fear what, or who, inhabits the territory on the other side. 

These are the lines by which we live: country lines, state lines, river lines, highway lines, train lines, power lines, water lines… We move amongst the lines as though we move freely. Yet they are not ours; they have been drawn for us. They are the scars of our past, circumscribing the stories we are told (i.e. history), and how individuals are permitted to exist within them.

My interest in these lines lies in my own immigrant history: in trying to understand the complicated shape of my own family, and the thousands of miles that separate us. 

My work is a study of lines of lineage,  lines of passage, lines of policy. I aim to question and contest these lines, reflecting a more accurate representation of our layered past by examining the environmental, cultural and political structures of permission by which we live. And in doing so, I seek to bring to highlight lines that are historically undocumented, unarchived, silenced.

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