ERRATIC FIELDS EXPEDITION
Punta Mazo, San Quintin, Baja California
August 22-26, 2022
In collaboration with Terra Peninsular.
For the first Conversation associated with The Sedimentary Effect, a group of ten artists, scientists, and curators from San Diego, CA, Mexicali, and Ensenada, Baja California was invited to an expedition of five days in Punta Mazo, San Quintin, Baja California, a natural reserve area protected by the non-profit organization Terra Peninsular. The group convened after a year of curatorial research and studio visits with practitioners from the region whose interests were rooted in the physical, ecological, historical, and social dimensions of landscape, natural phenomena, geography, and the environment.
During the experience, specialists from Terra Peninsular guided naturalist walks that delved into the history and evolution of the site conformed by extinct volcanoes, wetlands, sand dunes, the Pacific Ocean, and the archeological sites of the first hunter-gatherers of the region, a crucial landscape carefully selected to begin the conversation of The Sedimentary Effect and its focus on tracing historical, geological, and spiritual micro-histories and themes from this geographical context. Throughout these peripatetic experiences and informal gatherings, the group sustained conversations, interviews, and group discussions prompted by questions, readings and key words that varied from how geography, physical and human, shape our approximation to a territory, to what occurs, rests, moves, and lives invisibly beneath and above the surface that influences the physical realm we inhabit. Both, the expedition, and the many conversations resulted in an intersection of dialogues on notions about proximity and scale, language, slowness, ethics, storytelling, ecologies, and microscopic particles.