East Near Fear Peak            -ongoing-             

East Near Fear Peak interpolates the local folklore which surrounds the Los Alamos project. One of the interesting things I noticed when I started talking to people about this project was the idea that, for the people who live in New Mexico, the Los Alamos project was more of a failure than a success. It recolonized land, destroyed our environment, and lead to a decades long war of secrecy and surveillance within our community. The locality of this hyperglobal project was rarely considered.

The core of this work is a collection of images which track the way in which stories of Los Alamos turn into folklore in New Mexico. It does not operate as concrete, literal, or documentary. Instead, it tells the way in which the history falls down the tunnel, is beaten, weathered, and absorbed as local markers of something bigger. It shows how stories slip between the registers of a real event, and the malleable, pervasive local conscious of fear and mystery.

This story holds baggage — geographies, scientific genocides, expansionists, and a seismic scale of fear and destruction— which complicates our understanding of its truth. I think people here would argue that the folkloric register of the Los Alamos project is much more tangible than its factual history. It’s the experienced reality of everyone who lives in New Mexico. The hard lines of how it is experienced are fuzzy; the experienced and the orchestrated realities are interchangeable.
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