Joyride IV (The meantime is a nauseous thing) considers the riot as a hauntological repository, a voluminous fold which collapses rage and despair, pleasure and horror. The classification of an event as a riot within hegemonic discourses is often an epistemic flattening; it carves away vital historical and sociopolitical context to reveal itself as a racializing and (thus) criminalizing instrument. It names a gap of knowledge, the violation of an order which regulates “sense”, and a set of gestures which occupy the domain of the “senseless”. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, the riot is an important rupture in the respectability politics which undermine strategies of dissent and survival – it obsolesces the untenable model of virtuous disobedience, confronts the parameters of sensibility, of so-called law and order. Above all, the occurrence of a riot articulates configurations of power, regardless of its catalyst: it charts the regulation and surveillance of public space; conjures the intimacies between law enforcement, property, and the propertied; sketches the lines of racial and economic disparity which dissect the city. 

Images are sutured together to form a kaleidoscopic panorama of Los Angeles sports victory riots, a set of ante-political gestures marking the displacement of libidinal intensities emerging from collective disillusionment and deprivation to the symbolic register of sports. Edges of cars, flames, and bodies in ecstatic motion dissolve upon contact. The distinctive taillights of a Dodge Charger – a standard LAPD vehicle as well as a model popular amongst amateur street drifters in Los Angeles – beam through shadow and tire-smoke. The composition is printed on a grid of handmade papers, each sheet a unique blend of pulps and fibers including abaca, flax, and cotton linter, and detritus such as restaurant flyers and loose tobacco.