A Place Where We Are in the Sun

“A Place Where We Are in the Sun” explores the complexities of family, land, and belonging in Southern California from the perspective of an eighth-generation Californio: of Indigenous, Mexican, and European ancestry. Created on ancestral lands in and around Los Angeles, these physically manipulated and rephotographed family archives probe the intertwined relationships between land and kin, while reimagining the historical conditions embedded in the soil from which they emerge. In overgrown alcoves along highways, on Mission grounds, at sacred sites, in parking lots, and across parched hillsides, these landscapes become spaces where ancestors and the land they once knew so intimately are reunited.

“Lateral Ache,” another iteration of this ongoing deconstruction and reconstruction of familial, territorial, and cultural entanglements, also feeds this project. While the term ‘lateral’ is commonly associated with side-to-side movement akin to the act of weaving, it is also deeply tethered to the concept of violence within oppressed communities. Lateral violence refers to displaced pain directed toward one another rather than toward the systems of oppression that produced it. Therefore, “Lateral Ache” seeks to address the quieter, often unspoken sorrow that reverberates across generations, physically returning kin to the land through acts of weaving, collaging, and material intervention.

These interventions of mine applied to images attempt to compress the scales of history, engaging macro-level sociological and environmental shifts through the intimate lens of family. By physically manipulating family photographs, organic material breaks through the image surface, breaching the seal of the flattened past to form a living collage, my creative process dissolves the boundary between calcified history and the present moment, materially restructuring history and the now into a charged and coexistent whole.

Amy Elkins is part of Issue 18 by Guest Editor Hank Willis Thomas.