PA 61 (Destroyed)

2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
10:58 minutes

Three hours west of New York City is the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The story of this eastern ghost town’s demise has become legend: in 1962 burning trash ignited a vein of anthracite coal, starting an underground fire that continues to burn today, forcing the town’s depopulation. Centralia has since become a pilgrimage site; or rather a mile-long stretch of state route 61 outside of the town that sits abandoned, its surface buckled and cracked by the underground fire. It’s become known as the “Graffiti Highway,” and Google Maps lists it as “PA 61 (Destroyed).” Today the road is covered in color. Crudely written names, short messages, untrained drawings, declarations of love, vulgarities, and even twitter handles populate the damaged blacktop. This propagation of color sprayed on the surface has begun to extend past the road’s edge and onto the nearby maple saplings and sumac bushes. According to the artist Alex Lukas “it’s tempting to imagine these trees sprouting from the underground conflagration and blossoming in new and mutated ways… as if appearing in a science-fiction landscape.” The video PA 61 (Destroyed) by Alex Lukas combines fixed-camera shots filmed on the site by the artist, with excerpts sourced from YouTube, allowing the folkloric collage to tell the complex story of the site—blending sci-fi imagery, facts about the site’s history, and amateur documentation.

Alex Lukas’s practice is much akin to that of the researcher, historian or collector of folklore, exploring exceptional sites in the American landscape. However, unlike most historians, he doesn’t suppress the fictional narratives associated with a site. Instead these serve as markers for the presence of a cultural imaginary through constructed narratives about the past, and serve as points of fascination that shape the outcomes of his research. These often take the form of a constellation of aesthetic and informative objects related to a particular location’s layered uses, memory, and identity.

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