This is a collaborative group project for the University of California, Los Angeles Urban Humanities Program. The authors include Lili Raygoza, Cassie Hoeprich, Akana Jayewardene, and Tiffany Orozco.

eCodex: Los Angeles Trans-Culturation

Prompted by a call to create a dynamic, digital eCodex, inspired and informed by ancient and contemporary Mesoamerican codecies, this project represents a phenomenological approach to the aspects of spatial translation, “space-making” and the construction of identity, via corporeal-temporal-spatial orientation.

The resulting product is entitled eCodex: Los Angeles Trans-Culturation. It is a body of work composed of symbols and stories that reflect the performative placemaking that defines the immigrant and indigenous diaspora as it manifests in Los Angeles’s Westlake / MacArthur Park neighborhood.

Cultural Translations and Spatial Adaptations

Through this project, we explore cultural translations and spatial adaptations as they take place within the MacArthur Park communities at the micro scale and how global, migrational translations taking place in Los Angeles at the macro scale, and how the two scales interplay with one another. In considering corporeality, we analyze the body as a site in which linguistic and embodied semiotics perform ontologies that are contingent upon heterogenous histories.

Walter Benjamin in his 1921 essay "The Task of the Translator," argues: “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience” (“The Task of the Translator” 253). He goes on to speak to the role of a translator, one who is not the poet or conductor of the symphony, and their duty to “ultimately serve the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another” (“The Task of the Translator” 255). With this framing in mind, this eCodex will be composed of symbols that embody cultural translations and spatial adaptions.

Archive of the Suppressed

Understanding the asymmetry embedded within translation, historically biasing the colonizer and the “west”, we venture to uncover the archive of the suppressed. We will look specifically at indigenous place based practices and performative translation of knowledge. This understanding of place and environment is by and large lost or disregarded by modern/urban society, ostensibly resulting in natural disasters and imbalances. Through the lens of "critical archival studies," (Critical Archival Studies, 2) we aim to foreground the production of cultural knowledge and the contingency of corporeal practices; in doing so, we participate in a critical feminist curatorial intervention as we foreground ways in which the body–often minoritized by capitalism and patriarchal state power–creates and engages with these materials that depend on sometimes ephemeral relational dynamics. This corpus transforms the hegemonic notion of an archive as being comprised of institutional documents, into an archive that is composed within the urban fabric through a reclaiming of "placemaking" that defies national borders.

Reclaiming "Placemaking"

Building on De Certeau’s notion of “spatial trajectories,” we recognize the central role of the subject’s spatial practices that create narrative structures that “have the status of spatial syntaxes.” The spatial syntaxes thus constitute two distinctions within a field being “place” and “space.” “Place,” reflects a set of formal laws or jurisdictions that imply an indication of stability, while “space” consists of “intersections of mobile elements” that are enacted by a collaborating composition of “ensemble movements.” Through the subject’s enactment through multi-modal communication, the subject thus aggregates spatial syntaxes that define the boundaries of place and space specific at a site where heterogeneous power operates. Enactment of rituals with our archival objects are thus inscribed by the body which delineate practical social actions which translate bodily repertoires into spatial fields through practices of place and space-making.

Situating the eCodex

In order to bridge the theoretical approach with the present day context of Westlake / MacArthur Park, we set out in person and through digital explorations to uncover everyday manifestations of placemaking embodying performative acts of trans-culturation and "placemaking".