Speculative Architecture. Rhino 3D, Illustrator, Animation
CRITIC: Emanuel Admasu
In the summer of 1968, nearly ten years after becoming the 49th US state, the landscape of Alaska drastically changed when oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay. The land historically occupied by Inupiat peoples became subject to one of the largest capital enterprises in the US, as thousands flocked to the new state to mine its wealth. Despite outcries from many indigenous and environmental advocates, the project advanced under dissolute and politically divisive circumstances. To this day, the extracted oil drives the global economy. All current infrastructure in this region was prefabricated shipped via barge, air cargo, or truck. The region has suffered from global warming; ice now melting, historical routes for subsistence hunters now severed.
The Alaska Native Claims Act fixed once migratory communities into permanent settlements. Built housing was the only way to prove ownership of the land. The state was then divided into 13 native corporations that would serve as liaisons to extraction from their land. While many native peoples alive at the time were offered small shares in the companies earnings, each tribe was required to give up any personal claims to the land and the resources beneath. Instead, the land would belong to the corporation. The fossil fuel industry would build schools and help in transporting supplies to these remote communities. The more communities assimilated the more they relied on outside aid. Tribal customs became less accessible. As a result of climate warming, the landscape has been rapidly changing. What was already considered an inhospitable and harsh environment is becoming even more treacherous as the permafrost melts. Each spring, communities located near Prudhoe Bay are consistently flooded. Fragile tundra now an ever-changing ecology. Ritual grounds float away.
This intervention begins in the context of sea level rise and water contaminated by the oil industry. Carefully, over time, community members rebuild their homes and their sovereignty over the remains of the oil pipeline. As a way to critique the regime of property and the colonization of Alaska, cultural mythology becomes a method for rejection, one that is not fixed but instead unbound. This is especially true when it is displaced and forced to become transitory. When cultural memory is repatriated, it becomes a tool to imagine a new paradigm that recontextualizes customs for the present day.
For example, in one of the many creation myths, there are two worlds, a winter and a summer world. Children in the winter world kept dying, so the people sent a fox to break past the barrier between. The fox stole summer, but under the agreement it would only take part of it. This is why we have seasons. In modern times, this can be understood in reverse, the fossil fuel industry invoking an endless summer that must be stopped, life brought back to balance. Considering the pipeline as a street that connects nodes of extractive infrastructure, this intervention occupies it. These modules are assembled along the pipeline, and inhabited by the indiginous Alaskans. Over time, other materials are disassembled from the neighboring oil rigs for structural support. A pipeline that once transported oil now facilitates exchange.
Through a series of phases that may take decades to complete, these modules build and connect off of each other and become a new layer of “land” situated above what is toxic. Animals begin to return to the area and cultivate the land on top of the wood logs. A new top layer of soil forms and trees begin to take root. At the places where the intervention meets the sea, aquatic life reforms. Slow growth kelp forests cleans the water and species once native to the region that have since disappeared begin to return.
2021