| Terminal Island is an artificial landmass in
the heart of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, and was
the subject of an exhibit
at the CLUI Los Angeles from March 31 to May 30th, 2005.
The exhibit looked at Terminal Island as a sort of organismic,
flowing, landscape machine, composed of five separate terminal
activities that occur on the island: importation, exportation,
excretion, deportation and expulsion. Each one of these activities
was described in text, and depicted through video captured by
CLUI personnel over the months prior to the exhibit.
This landscape machine churns and disgorges wastes in its treatment
plant, and grinds up metals in its scrap yards. Fluids course
through pipelines under its skin, while ships of crude pump in
to it, and suck out of it. Its extremities are a bouquet of dead
ends, of society pushed to the limits, with prisons, coast guards,
piers and ground up riprap.
As the center of the largest port in the Americas, the nation’s
economy flows across its thousands of acres of asphalt, in the
form of digitized cubes of material trade, in twenty and forty
foot equivalences. It was for this, more than anything, that the
island grew out of the ocean, an extension of the continental
reach towards the orient.
Its scale is beyond sensation by the senses, and its functions
exceed the imaginations of our daily lives. Terminal Island is
like a fictional place, made real by the collective will of America.
The exhibit was made possible by a grant from the City of Los
Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the CLUI Fund for
the Study of Islands and Distant American Landmasses. A
bus and boat tour were also conducted as part of this exhibit.
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