Why an LA artist 'adopted' the Topanga Canyon landslide

In early June, Topanga Canyon’s main coastal route reopened three months ahead of schedule after a massive spring landslide.

While the California Department of Transportation trucked the debris to sites in Malibu and Port Hueneme, a chunk of the hillside made an unlikely journey to downtown Los Angeles, where it will revitalize a historic park and join a living art and environmental experiment.

The project is the latest endeavor of environmental artist Lauren Bon’s effort to create a “new normal” where creatives and government agencies collaborate to solve big problems around how we manage natural resources.

“What if disturbances in ecology create abundance?” Bon said. “What if we were to retrieve this material instead of discard it?”

Time makes you boulder

The hillside above Topanga Canyon Boulevard crashed onto the roadway on March 9 amid heavy rain.

The landslide created a lengthy detour for San Fernando Valley commuters, hampered local businesses, and blocked a critical evacuation route as fire season approached.

In April, Caltrans quantified the scale of the landslide as enough to fill 5,500 dump trucks.

Though that estimate was later revised downward, “A window in my thinking of being annoyed and frightened about the imposition of the landslide kind of opened up,” said Bon, a longtime Topanga Canyon resident. Bon is the daughter of philanthropist Wallis Annenberg and Metabolic Studio is an extension of the family’s foundation.

Bon and the team at Metabolic Studio collaborated with government agencies, engineers, and others to test the soil and secure the necessary permissions to transport and store the materials.

Topanga Canyon Boulevard (SR-27) reopened June 2, three months ahead of schedule. The stretch between Pacific Coast Highway and Grand View Drive was closed after a landslide damaged the road in March.

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Caltrans District 7

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One of 150 truckloads of soil and debris bound for Metabolic Studio and L.A. State Historic Park.

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Stefano Galli

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Courtesy Metabolic Studio

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“Seeing multiple different agencies be able to very quickly come together and make something happen was very impressive and really heartening,” said Metabolic Studio project manager Kelly Majewski.

Clean soil is a valuable construction resource, but the team needed to secure space for the material in mere weeks.

“It seemed really exciting,” said California State Parks Los Angeles District Superintendent Richard Fink II. “Kind of like a full circle opportunity because we could take the soils from the Santa Monica Mountains and the Topanga State Park area and potentially reuse them here in Los Angeles.”

Climb a mountain and turn around

The park’s 50 truckloads of soil is destined for four acres of the sprawling Los Angeles State Historic Park that remain undeveloped.

“It's been basically cleared, remediated, and it's been left as an open palette for our next phase,” Fink said.

The parks system is exploring a collaboration with Metabolic Studios as the land is developed. Bon’s 2005 project “Not A Cornfield” cultivated millions of ears of the eponymous vegetable on the land that’s now the park.

Environmental artist Lauren Bon has lived in Topanga Canyon for 20 years and relies on Route 27 to reach Metabolic Studio in downtown Los Angeles.

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Richard Nielsen

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Courtesy Metabolic Studio

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The remaining 100 truckloads of slip went to Bon’s Metabolic Studio. She described the acquisition of the landslide as an adoption.

“It's not like we're just placing a…dispossessed landscape from a slid mountain to someplace else,” Bon said. “We're now taking care of it.”

Bring it down

Part of the landslide resides at “The Moon,” a truck-yard-turned-environmental-experimentation lab on Pasadena Avenue along the L.A. River.

A combination of shady cloth covers and mist machines will help one mound feel like it’s in its coastal birthplace. Another pile is mixed with matter from the L.A. River’s floodplain, and the largest mass has been compressed into a boulder-strewn mini-mountain.

These heart-shaped leaves were the first to emerge from landslide soil after its relocation to Metabolic Studios. Hearts are an ongoing theme in Metabolic Studio's work. In 2023, Bon submerged a metal scale model of a blue whale's heart in a pool of toxic water pumped from the Salton Sea as part of Desert X.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The studio acknowledges the soil made up the home of today’s Gabrielino Shoshone, Tongva and Kizh, and Fernandeño Tataviam nations and plans to consult those communities as the project evolves.

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The project seeks to answer many questions, including, “Can we keep that soil healthy and well long enough for the next generation to do the greatest good for the greatest number of living systems in the shortest amount of time?”

One idea is to layer the landslide soil atop unpaved land along the L.A. River to create new ecosystems where the ground was once smothered in concrete.

“Moving Mountains” builds on Bon’s effort to reconnect the L.A. River to the floodplain.

Bon obtained more than 75 permits from varying agencies to gain permission to draw water from the river. The ongoing project seeks to funnel the water in L.A. State Historic Park for irrigation.

Bon acknowledged it would be easier to create art that fits within the walls of a gallery.

“If you just work within a social organization that's very similar to you where you feel accepted, you may not allow the work to reach the largest capacity it has to do work in the world,” Bon said. “I want to be doing work that has applications on a larger scale than I can realize on my own. I want to see systemic changes happen.”