Rosten Woo is an artist and community activist who likes to examine people’s relationship to the environment. His latest work is entitled What Water Wants. It’s part of the PST ART event sponsored by the Getty and happening now at more than 70 museums and art spaces across Southern California.
What Water Wants is an immersive audio experience set on the banks of the LA River. You wear headphones and sit at the water’s edge, just below the Glendale freeway in Frogtown. Narration and music play as you watch the water roll by.
“It's like guided meditation into speculative horror, moving between something that's really serene and peaceful, and then something that's pretty grating and scary,” Woo describes his project. “Obviously [it] has a lot to do with the way that we relate to water in Los Angeles.”
He adds, “[The LA River is] a place that you see like incredible beauty thriving despite the city’s attempt to drown it out at every moment. You have these massive concrete banks, and then you have incredible greenery and bird life passing through.”
A storm drain is seen along the LA River. Photo by Matthew Scott.
LA gets its water from two aqueducts that start in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the north and a third from the Colorado River to the east. Most of the water people see in the LA River is treated wastewater, unless rain adds storm runoff.
“Essentially all the water we're seeing right now … we've used it once and then we've dumped it out into this channel, and now it's just like flowing out to the ocean. Very credible people believe that there is a way for us to live in Los Angeles without taking any water from those locations. It's just a matter of when and how much pain we're going to endure in the meantime, but the Colorado River is going dry,” he says.
“I hope people leave with a sense of their own agency in determining how water is going to move through Los Angeles, and how people in Los Angeles are going to survive the next 50 to 100 years,” says artist Roston Woo. Photo by Matthew Scott.
Woo hopes this audio piece will get people connected to and curious about his ongoing redevelopment project. Over the next several years, Woo and others are building a permanent art installation across the banks of the river. A former rail yard, known as Bowtie Parcel, will become a public park and daylit storm drain.
“I hope people leave with a sense of their own agency in determining how water is going to move through Los Angeles, and how people in Los Angeles are going to survive the next 50 to 100 years. And thinking that there's a lot at stake, and a lot of things that we can really be actively doing that are really straightforward, whether it's greening their schoolyard or changing landscaping to drought-tolerant native plants. I would love for people to be able to come to a place like this and see how all those parts are connected.”