The Alluvials
Alice Bucknell, 2023

4k single-channel video, sound, colour, 38 min., 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

The Alluvials is a speculative fiction film exploring the politics of drought and water scarcity in Los Angeles. Its narrative is told through a variety of nonhuman and elemental perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore called El Aliso, and the ghost of the city’s celebrity mountain lion, P-22.

Spread across seven chapters and as many worlds, The Alluvials oscillates forwards and backward in time, exploring multiple possible futures and revisited pasts for LA. It draws on game engine world-making, drone mapping, custom stable diffusion “hallucinations”, and cinematic modding inside the GTA 5 engine to conjure a richly layered parafictional world where boundaries between fact and fiction and subject and landscape dissolve.

Acknowledging indigenous relationships to water and nonlinear time—particularly those of the Tongva, the original stewards of the region known today as Los Angeles—The Alluvials asks its audience to consider their role in the future of water systems by looking into the deep past.