Event
Significant and Insignificant Mounds/Laboratory for Suburbia
Significant and Insignificant Mounds:
We are told that prior to European contact, North America was a territory defined by its emptiness. A space without human mark. A fallow continentdevoid of evidence of human occupation and meaning. But under the settler-colonial ploughs, pierced by the land surveyors monuments, and shrouded by cities and fields, is a vast network of pre- European Native American Indian Mounds. They stand in silent witness to a millennia of North American settlement, being, and meaning that puts to rest this narrative of absence.
Yet alongside these burial, effigy, and temple mounds are the mounds of our present day. Slag heaps, landfills, and sundry detritus of an anthropogenic landscape that we make when we dont think about making landscapes.
Significant and Insignificant Mounds looks to read these two landscapes across one anotherto complicate our understandings of authenticity, meaning, and form. The project looks to the building and unbuilding of landscapesmounds & mines, piles & pitsto define one symptom of the anthropogenic condition we inhabit today. The project hopes to set up a flicker of signification between the proximate and the distant, to push back on a narrative of singularity, to position humans within a continental history that long predates contact, and to draw an interpretive arc that crosses through the now and the then and the forever.
Laboratory for Suburbia:
Domesticating the Anthropocene, the first public component of Laboratory for Suburbia, consists of two bus tours investigating suburbia as a characteristic spatial form of the Anthropocene in the global North. Suburbia is not only resource-intensive to build and maintain, but both its physical form and the ways of life that operate in it can often obscure human connections to land and the environmental impacts of capitalist extraction, production and consumption. Considering the extensive legacy of nuclear contamination that affects suburban watersheds in St. Louis, as well as the Midwests accelerating cycle of century storms and floods, the tours route will stitch together the regions vast suburban landscape and its great rivers.
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LocationThe Luminary (View)
2701 Cherokee Street
St. Louis, MO 63118
United States
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