Civil Society is a three-channel video installation that deals with the politics of language and visibility of events of civil unrest, specifically those that occurred in Los Angeles in 1992 and Paris in 2005. The work is structured around the site of an absence in which an off-screen voice explores a lacuna in relation to the events of 1992 in Los Angeles. Fifteen years after the events, in an attempt to recover some understanding of a past that appears barred from her, she travels to Paris as a filmmaker after the civil unrest of 2005 occurs on the city’s outskirts. Between Los Angeles and Paris, she enacts a kind of displacement in which she attempts to open a new relationship to the events of the past through the present. In the asynchrony between these disparate times and spaces, she explores the social and political reasons why a past might exist as loss, asks how a recognition of loss might allow space for that which remains unspoken and unspeakable, and asks toward how grief might transform the way one continues onward.

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