Where the snow-fed Rio del Llano met the edge of the desert(2023 Length: 04:56 min), is a site specific film, in 2019 I visited the geographical location, Pear blossom Highway in California which is near the Antelope Valley (the armpit of California). A place also known as The Socialist Ruins. Here, Job Harriman, a socialist lawyer who ran for Vice President of the United States, Governor of California and Mayor of Los Angeles, founded in 1914 the cooperative colony – Llano del Rio which means plain by the river and the colony flourished for four years between 1914 to 1918. The cooperative Llano del Rio was a pioneer in agriculture with alfalfa, corn and pear cultivation, among others, and has named the highway – Pear blossom Highway. I’ve filmed with a Bolex camera and 16 mm b/w high contrast 3378 Kodak film, which I have then painted by hand with ink directly on the celluloid. The film is inspired by Robert Kinmont’s photographic series My Favorite Dirt Roads (1969). The sound collage is based on Delia Derbyshire’s radio program for the BBC – Inventions for Radio Dreams from 1964, where persons are describing how they dream about a specific place and how the landscape looks like in this place.
