Pale Coast: A Cenotaph

Pale Coast: A Cenotaph is Boz Deseo Garden’s first film, which premiered on August 26, 2022 at Jargon Projects in Chicago. The film’s (anti)narrative drifts through three fictional interview transcripts between Patricia Decker, a former employee of SERRF, and Fran Russell, a reporter for Long Beach Press-Telegram. Framed as performances of irreparably damaged recordings from public archives, the “original” transcript is “re-performed” by actress Zurah Lynn Taylor (as Patricia) and Garden (as Fran). The film takes as its primary speculative grounds SERRF, a Long Beach waste-to-energy incineration facility, and the Khian Sea, a cargo ship contracted to transport and dump Philadelphia’s toxic waste ash in Haiti in 1987. Mythology is interwoven with archival record to interrogate the efficacy of proof, the ethics of archival stewardship and a racialized attachment to a distinction between history and fabulation.

This film was directly inspired by the material Garden pulled from the Arthur B. Friedman collection and the Research Materials on Air Pollution in Los Angeles, both available through UCLA Library Special Collections. The former collection consisted of recorded and transcribed interviews and hearings at San Quentin State Prison in the late 1960’s and the latter, an assortment of printed matter on films, organizations and data exposing the harmful effects of the pollutants that hang in the Los Angeles skyline.

The film’s primary questions become: what can be recovered or proven if one’s archival research occurs within the heap of ash? Within a substance whose origin has been lost or which was never there to begin with? Or within an ontology that cannot be distinguished from its captivity to an imposed absence.

Boz Deseo Garden (b. 1997) is an artist and theorist whose interdisciplinary practice works within the material and conceptual impasses between Afropessimism and psychoanalysis. Through sculpture, video, archival study and critical writing, Garden positions transatlantic slavery as the unconscious ligature for knowledge production, Western notions of form and matter and psychoanalytic modes of enjoyment.

Garden is currently a CFPRT Research Scholar at UCLA Library Special Collections. Their recent solo exhibitions and group exhibitions include Timeshare, Los Angeles (2024), Petrine, Paris (2023), Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023), Active Cultures, Los Angeles (2023), Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2022), Jargon Projects, Chicago (2022), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2021) and Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Los Angeles (2020). Their writing was recently published by Cassandra Press (2022) and presented at UC Irvine’s Comparative Literature Conference (2022). They received their B.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts and are an M.F.A. Candidate in New Genres at the University of California, Los Angeles.