Los Angeles is a collection of instant landscapes you traverse by car. Landscapes that evoke an imagery of signs, billboards, stores, endless roads, and hills. But the Californian metropolis, where the sun never sets, is composed of invisible, fragmented landscapes that only a slow vision, like that of photography, allows you to see. The Los Angeles River is a hidden landscape made up of infrastructures, bridges, viaducts, and dams alternating with the seriality of industrial and residential settlements. A river that isn't used by citizens but by filmmakers as a set for movies like Grease, Terminator 2, Drive, In Time, The Core, and the famous music video Happy by Pharrell Williams. The river landscape is not experienced as a leisure space, as is the case in Italy and Europe. It is perceived as a necessary and useful infrastructure but not as a community space, despite the Los Angeles River Revitalization being active since 1991. Introini has an analytical vision based on the redesign of urban maps as an act of territory census, but above all to connect with places and later developed through photography. The river, or rather the canal, is not visible from the road. In fact, the speed at which you traverse the metropolis fixes large natural and artificial objects in our memory, but not that strip of water and concrete that extends for 77 km, from its beginning at the confluence of Bell Creek and Arrojo Calabasas in the San Fernando Valley, all the way to its mouth in the Pacific Ocean in Long Beach. These photographs can help introduce the ever-changing landscape of the river, with artificial elements like bridges and dams contrasted with areas where you are completely immersed in nature and no longer perceive the metropolis.


Emanuele Piccardo, 2018
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