Los Angeles’ last wetland, a nearly 600-acre site north of Los Angeles International Airport, is called Ballona. Through photography and film the project Inside Ballona Waachnga wanders the region, tracing how humans and other creatures perceive their surroundings and experience the passage of time. What tools, methods, and imaginative technologies help us understand the world—and how verdant are they in revealing other ways of seeing?
In the Ballona Wetlands, freshwater from stormwater runoffs mixes with salty ocean water. These marshy areas create unique zones making it one of the most plentiful ecosystems for plants and migrating birds you'll find anywhere.
As a transplant to Los Angeles from Berlin, a formerly divided city, and as an artist whose practice has taken shape across multiple continents, I bring a migratory perspective to my work.
I approach the moving image as a way to map emotional and environmental geographies, focusing on spaces in transition, especially those on the margins of urban transformation.
Get your hands dirty! Artists and researchers from various fields are all welcome to join in.
“We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species.”
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness
Inside Ballona Waaachnga acknowledges ancestral Native land. The Tongva people called the Ballona Wetlands their ancestral land Waachnga or Pwinukipar, meaning "full of water.”
An ever-changing project by Halina Kliem in Los Angeles, California.
Thank you to the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Ecokai, and Friends of Ballona Wetlands.
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