Semi-Tropic Spiritualists Test Site No. 3: The Search For Open Ground was first staged as part of Shangrila 2013: Burrito Deluxe in Joshua Tree. Its a breezy fall afternoon in Monterey Park at the Vincent Price Art Museum on the campus of East Los Angeles College, where Astri Swendsrud and Quinn Gomez-Heitzeberg stand shoulder to shoulder in black blazers and pants - shes fair, her hair drawn up in a grey kerchief; hes bearded, burly, and bespectacled. On the lapels of both their blazers hang the same insignia - a rectangular strip of red ribbon. Both clutch a pamphlet. This is the text that will lead their performance, a spiritual s ance of sorts. The symbols are all in place: the divination tool - a skeletal, rectangular box set on its end, open to the wind with a swaying pendulum inside; a pyramid; and a fire.
Swendsrud and Gomez-Heitzeberg lead the crowd in a call-and-response chant of high-moral recitations: Let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate. Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait. The words are from a text by Andrew Jackson Davis, one of the primary founders of the Spiritualist movement that emerged in the middle of the 19th century. Swendsrud and Gomez-Heitzeberg are more than five years immersed in the study of the Spiritualists work and writings. They are in an ongoing personal artistic project that is about uncovering and resituating a local past activated by communities like the Spiritualists, where faith and its failed utopias are intertwined. Their performance-based experiments offer a place of opportunity to think about the mechanics of spiritual life anew - in terms of community, metaphysical truths, devotional and moral practice.
Just west of Elysian Park, at the corner of Riverside Drive and Allesandro Street, up a grassy incline and back amongst the sycamores are the ruins of the original Semi-Tropic Spiritualist encampment of Los Angeles. Long ago, at the bucolic edge of L.A. where the red line stopped (which is now the neighborhood of Silver Lake), residents would take weekend excursions for recreation, camping and - for a time in the early 20th century - participate in a wildly popular type of spiritual retreat replete with seances, workshops, and lectures by mystics and moral guides (other spiritual groups and their pilgrims gathered at the Riverside Drive site as well during that time). The Spiritualist movement started in 1849 in New York and made its way west through the 1880s. But as it moved towards California, it was dying back east, weighted down by charlatanism and controversies. Business was good for the Spiritualists in Los Angeles from about 1903 to 1915, but the movement left behind very little trace or legacy locally, leaving an obscured understanding of cultural consequences or after effects from the Southern Californian arm of the movement. Preachers the likes of Jackson Davis, however, wrote quite extensively about Spiritualism as a whole, and remnants of the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists do exist today. For the most part, though, the movement was over by 1930.
Swendsrud discovered the Spiritualist movement while researching female mediums of the early 1900s, from a feminist perspective. These women could go into places of privilege and speak with authority because they were transmitting someone elses voice, she says. Gomez-Heitzeberg, Swendsruds co-collaborator and husband, was also fascinated by the concepts of the movement. They were both astonished at the dearth of evidence left by L.A.s Spiritualists despite finding a significant amount of detail about the larger national movement. And when they found that they lived near the original Spiritualist settlement in Silver Lake, says Gomez-Heitzeberg, We were both so excited about a project based on it. We said, Were going to fight about this if we dont do it together.
Semi-Tropic Spiritualists Test Site No. 3: The Search For Open Ground was first staged as part of Shangrila 2013: Burrito Deluxe in Joshua Tree.
Swendsrud and Gomez-Heitzeberg met at the California Institute of the Arts where they received their masters degrees in fine art. They had collaborated together briefly before 2013 - but since then, their Semi-Tropic Spiritualists project has consumed them both. They continue to research the local metaphysical and spiritual past as they travel to visit the vestiges of other somewhat related mystical groups and sites (Harmony Grove, a Spiritualist community in Escondido, and Lomaland, a Theosophist center in San Diego, are a few) whose combined mission towards spiritual enlightenment and attempts at self-sufficiency are at the core of Swendsrud and Gomez-Heitzebergs interests.
We were both exploring ideas of mysticism and our own faith and belief and we needed a structure, the STS story and its history, in a very specific place, gave us a historical background but one that we couldnt really find that much out about, so we borrowed their name, and established ourselves continuing their investigations. But he and Swendsrud arent just re-activating the old groups ideas, he adds, Were making our own symbolism and making our own connections to history, spirituality, and place.
Semi-Tropic Spiritualists Test Site No. 2 was first staged at the Vincent Price Art Museum.
One of our favorite moments so far was at the Vincent Price Museum, Swendsrud says. That particular performance, Semi-Tropic Spiritualist Test Site No.2, featured the pair reading Spiritualist texts and asking the audience to participate by chanting a response after each. It was about building our own fire and our own camp - a space for a shared search for knowledge, Swendsrud says. As the texts were read, they pieced together a nested set of wooden pyramids. With each new level, candles were lit and placed into holders within the structure. As the pyramid grew, so did the
