Joel Garcia with Meztli Projects - Astrorohizal Networks

Over the summer of 2021, Oxy Arts launched "Encoding Futures: Speculative Monuments for L.A.", a remote summer residency program. Over a 3-month period, artists Nancy Baker-Cahill, Audrey Chan, Joel Garcia with Meztli Projects and Patrick Martinez researched and developed original virtual monuments to be geo-located at sites across Los Angeles. The monuments are accessible for the public to view through the 4th Wall app.
The prompt for the residency was to conceive a blueprint for a site-specific imagined future, and consider technologically enabled transformations that might shape the future of the site.
Joel garcia with Meztli Projects created Astrorohizal Networks. Astrorhizal Networks is a monument that imagines the possibilities for a future in Los Angeles where Native people are not just acknowledged, but land has been returned and new growth has begun. Joel Garcia chose the site where the Junipero Serra statue stood until summer 2020, when it was toppled in a ceremony. In its place, Garcia has placed an oak sapling, radiating green circles of light out and up towards a constellation of stars. Throughout, you see acorns dot the sky. The image of the oak sapling calls on the possibility of growth and repair. Garcia notes that the radiating green rings function as a type of collective holding-an articulation of our community caring for and encouraging the oak tree to grow. This work is a gesture towards rebuilding connection to the earth, and de-centering human experience. The animated vertical movement also calls our attention to the connection between the roots, earth and sky.
Learn more at www.oxy.edu/oxy-arts/current-...