SEISMOGRAPH - TRAILER 0’43’’
Never has a title so accurately captured the essence of Laurent Ajina’s work, pursued from city to city around the world, and now, more specifically, the 5’28’’-minute film he just filmed in Los Angeles: Seismograph.For years, the artist has been fascinated surveying arteries of modern megalopoleis and labyrinths of tangled streets in ancient cities that date back to the origins of our sedentary existence. Each crossing of an urban space is as if had been captured, recorded in the deployment of its horizontal and vertical lines, with more or less depth depending on the extent of the stratigraphic layers, then depicted with the help of a marker on the chosen surface according to the location. This time, the surface is a 20-meter-long immaculate white canvas on which the artist traces his line, his trajectory, slowly or frenetically such a seismograph giving its report on vibrations, tensions, pulsations and oscillations, movements and the linear nature of the city of Los Angeles, a long ribbon of urban land lying between the hills of California, between the San Andreas fault and the ocean, its oscillations, its waves, the flow of energy created by two magnetic poles - pleasure and danger.
What the drone captures in high definition as it hovers over a rooftop in downtown L.A. and over the Rose Bowl parking lot in Pasadena is the action of the artist as he recreates his Californian dream; the free expression in black marker of the mental cartography of his trajectory in Los Angeles today.
LOS ANGELES, 2020