Since July 2012, a group of Los Angeles performance artists from and international guests passing through town have met regularly to engage in a practice called “Encounter,” organized by Peruvian-American performance artist Mariel Carranza. We’ve established familiarity and a history of working together in this spontaneous, collaborative, interdisciplinary manner.

We held our 37th Encounter (the second ever performed for an invited audience) as a fundraiser to bring four guest artists to LA for the Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA. It was a hot and sticky afternoon. Carol McDowell tap danced in a pool of water. A roll of blue masking tape was used to chart imaginary horizons across the white walls and cement floors. Mariel Carranza fashioned an ersatz breast pump from a plastic funnel, a bellows-style air pump, black duct tape, and a giant white balloon containing turmeric juice which she inflated until it exploded, staining the concrete floor. Paul Outlaw negotiated the space blind, in blacked-out goggles. Sebastian Hernandez changed outfits in 30-minute intervals, like clockwork. Audience members were transformed into participants and co-conspirators. They each brought their own contributions to a communal soup that was shared at the end.

As a nomadic practice, temporarily occupying empty outdoor spaces, rooftops, parks, caves, and alleys, “Encounter” is very much an Angeleno animal. Artists in Los Angeles are constantly on the move, occupying space as they find it, and then moving on to find the next space. When we encounter a new site, we invest literal blood, sweat, and tears into the DNA of the soil, concrete, water, brick, wood, and dust we find there. Our DNA lives in the Venice Pier, the Salton Sea, the “bat caves” of Griffith Park, and the roof tar of now-renovated buildings downtown. We’ve encountered glass, wire, discarded love letters, soiled garments, wild flowers, rotting chicken carcasses, ground fish bones, and men with knives in whose territory we unwittingly wandered. Encounter is how we live as artists in Los Angeles: we wander, settle, invite friends, respond, create, eat together, and wander on.

“Encounter” as a practice is rooted in performance art, installation, happenings, and public interventions. Indebted to Black Market International for the initial inspiration, our practice of “Encounter,” as we have developed it in Los Angeles, is quite different from that of our European colleagues. We are influenced by the countless artists, elders, and groups that have informed each of us. While our “Encounters” are not explicitly acts of political protest, our practice evades capitalist art market structures that commodify performance, as we perform outside of institutions and (normally) without audience or publicity. We evoke the complex histories of the sites we encounter, and channel current events and concerns through our dictum to respond to the “now.”