"BPM (Beats Per Minute)" Syllabus

Every year, Level Ground residents curate their own syllabus to reflect the critical, creative, and imaginative foundations of their residency work. This syllabus, from 2023-2024 resident artist Gemma Jimenez Gonzalez invites us to ponder what it would mean for LA to reimagine the ways we move our bodies throughout the city.

Curator’s Note:

I share with you a mixture of imaginations on the way we move across land, transit systems, and the urban ecology known today as Los Angeles. These imaginations share a mixture of known and faded stories. Symptoms of white supremacy, criminalization, colonization, and capitalism. Sounds that tricks the imagination into believing you are walking on Broadway in the year 2000. You ever walk by the 170 freeway, close your eyes to imagine waves crashing? I can almost taste the salt.

Made up of a population of about 9.83 million, people move day or night at various beats. Yet, this car-centric landscape filled with wide roads, billboards asking if you’re injured, freeways dominating black and brown neighborhood, and bumper to bumper traffic make us forget there are other ways to move. Who then walks LA?

What would the landscape look like if we can roam with much ease at the beat that our own drum desired?

What would LA look like if we can take up public space and feel safe and secure in our bodies?

How do we honor the flora and fauna that share space with us?

In the words of the Untokening Collective: “Mobility Justice demands that we fully excavate, recognize, and reconcile the historical and current injustices experienced by communities–When people live at the intersection of multiple vectors of oppression, unfettered access to mobility and public space are not guaranteed.”

All this today say, how can we reclaim the imagination on the ways we move our bodies to create networks of joy, opportunity, and wonder?

—Gemma Jimenez Gonzalez

1. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) by Thom Anderson (Film)

2. Untokening 1.0 — Principles of Mobility Justice by Untokening Collective (PDF, 22 pages)

3. City of Quartz by Mike Davis (Book, 441 pages)

4. Peeping Tom Tom Girl by Marisela Norte (Book, 120 pages)

5. The Case For Letting Malibu Burn by Mike Davis (Article)

“A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.”

— Mike Davis

6. BOMB- City Terrace Field Manuel by Sesshu Foster (Magazine)