HOME > LA CONCHITA La Conchita mon amour takes place in the aftermath of a mudslide caused by devastating debris flow in 2005, north of LA. Since then, this small town has built, and continuously maintained and rebuilt, an improvised zone of very personal shrines just off the coastal highway One. What’s the love part? Past participle. Pris-partie: to take part. To take apart. It was an accident. La Conchita: little shell. A swervy curl riptide inside the Red Mountain Fault at the base of the Rincon. Fibonacci-ing. Exquisite climate, you can live cheap, the Rincon surf is perfect, surfers say, best above LA. You can live cheap because the price you could pay for being there is your life. The sensuous surface whispers I am putting up with this, no you are putting this up, we are in this together. Fatal nuance of the lusciousness of everything, being in the lushness. In the heart of this, a lot of black. As Nevelson believed, the nascence of everything, the best color. Their improvised, haphazard, profuse responses to the mudslide compel some kind of mimicry on my part. La Conchita in love: a state of continuous error, a 10 hectare mistake that keeps pushing back up out of the dirt. The video as glossalallia, compulsively trying to repeat a message—I love you, I love you, I love you. A subMerzian mission: make a large dark body of strange dark photomontages, a cinematic video, nearly infra-thin drawings as/if debris flow, an eight channel video installation, and various writings including an essay and interview, and a small self published monograph. I used hundreds of images shot over 15 months; many are lost in the remix and in the darkness, as the impulse to strip things to bare bones colludes with the archive. Swerve: lost things come back.

“Bare Life and the Traumatic Landscape: La Conchita mon amour”, interview, Christina McPhee with Amy Wiley. First published for virose.pt 2006; edited and republished for documenta 12 Magazine Project, 2007 Christina McPhee, “La Conchita Paradise,” first published for exhibition monograph, “La Conchita mon amour,” 2006 La Conchita Paradise (en français) 2007 La Conchita by: Nicholas Ruiz III International Journal of Baudrillard Studies Volume 4, Number 1 (January 2007) Net Art Project at Turbulence.org