Luiza Pârvu, Toma Peiu - music composition by Anya Yermakova
9-channel video installation, radio, scaffolding equipment
Opening at the Rocket Space - Danelle Plaza, April 25th - May 5th, 2025
Radio broadcast @ 90.5 FM

The dry river beds of Arizona and the desiccated Aral Sea in Central Asia share histories of man-made ecological catastrophe, 20th century imperial ambitions and grassroots resilience. Ecosystems come under pressure from unchecked development in construction and agriculture facilitating new settlement, as the land becomes fetishized and commodified through a pervasive media gaze. How do governments and big enterprises master the land and its inhabitants? This installation includes:

Once Upon a Time, a River- Center-piece performative audiovisual composition, recorded in the Sun Valley of Arizona, on the ancestral lands of the O’odham and Pima people, in 2024; 

The Sea Was Here - Short ethnographic film called, shot in Moynaq, Qaraqalpaqstan, Uzbekistan, in 2018; 

On the Bottom of the Sea - A montage of 360-video recordings captured in present-day urban spaces that used to site on the bottom of the former Aral Sea in Moynaq, in 2018

Slideshow of images of early settlement in Tempe AZ and current-day grassroots creative repurposing of suburban space in the once-futuristic Danelle Plaza; 

Advertorial segments encouraging settlement in 1940-1970s Sun Valley, AZ

Soviet newsreels integrating the former fishing industries of the Aral Sea, as well as the subsequent upstream cotton growing-boom that brought upon their demise

A slideshow of images of public places and everyday moments, taken in Moynaq and Aral, Qazaqstan, between 2018-2021

An ensemble of decommissioned televisions, mute witnesses to media-enabled settlement

The soundtrack also broadcasts via radio, on a frequency available locally in Danelle Plaza, Tempe AZ - 90.5 FM

Caution: Once Upon a Time, a River / Once Upon a Time, a Sea is our cautionary tale about the scars of unequal power dynamics upon the lands we occupy; and a tribute to everyday civilian tactics emerging from the cracks of a scorched Earth, that foster alternative imaginaries of tomorrow. What would that look like to you?

A Root Films installation - rootfilms.org
Sound by Anya Yermakova - anyayermakova.com
Supported by Tempe History Museum, the University of Colorado Boulder, Herberger Institute for Design & the Arts at Arizona State University