UC San Diego

Parking Lot Park is a live public event that maps the various geographies - geologic, political, social, and sexual- which intersect within the first Open Space Park of San Diego, California: San Clemente Canyon. Currently known as Marian Bear Park, the land has undergone many transformations: formerly a harvest spot for the Kumeyaay and later grazing territory for Mission era cattle ranchers, the presently U.S.-owned canyon was protected from highway expansions in the 1970s by it's namesake, Marian Bear. Parking Lot Park unfolded November 8th, and 9th 2014 as a sound promenade and drive-in theater within the canyon itself. Staged for audiences of 50, participants traversed the canyon with flashlights to discover 6 sound installations. Each sound promenade station gave voice to an individual layer of the human geography of Marian Bear Park. Projected through a set of custom-built speakers, stories were told through looping recorded vocal narration, and are interwoven and counterbalanced with processed and manipulated field recorded sounds from the canyon. The evening concluded with a drive-in theater about the origin myth erotics of the canyon, accompanied by an FM radio sound composition designed for the insulated intimacy of a car cab. By drawing out individual threads of material and social engagement in San Clemente Canyon, the project proposes that landscape is a constantly shifting expression of emergent, dominant, and residual patterns. Parking Lot Park presents geologic time as both erotic and contingent as the dynamic between lovers, and conversely, that human environmental influence is as much of a layer as sedimentary rock