This project focuses on where I live in rural Sacramento and how so many places here are seemingly empty or abandoned. Many of these things are so normalized that they have just blended into the landscape. If I look out from the front door of my house, I can see the two decommissioned nuclear towers in the distance. The area around them is now used as a vineyard. Old barns line many of the roads around here. Most have roofs that are caved in or walls that are rotting away. Behind a housing development that is mostly still just roads leading nowhere and two by fours, there’s two trucks and old farm equipment that slowly rust away. The empty lot that was supposed to be a mall is now just a dumping ground for old stoves and tires. All of these things have been integrated into what it means to live here. Land gets repurposed and old structures get used by cows and other animals. Old houses eventually get bought and fixed up and others start falling apart again. Abandoned is never a permanent way of being because on a long enough timeline everything is put to use.
This project has led me to take notice and explore things that have blended into the background in my eyes. Places I just assumed were nothing actually had something unique about them. I was able to learn more about where I live and document it in a way to show others. Blue skies and long expanses of grass aren’t the only things of note once you leave the city, there’s a lot of important substance between cities too.
