I was recently asked to submit an entry to the To Extremes public art exhibition on Climate Change curated by MIT Knight Fellow Eli Kintisch. I enlisted Jack Becker with whom I worked on the UNESCO Delta Cities of The Future competition in 2010. As per the spirit of the competition, we also collaborated with geographer Chris Watson and climatologist Paul Kirschen of the Boston Harbor Association's Climate Change Forum. Essentially we were interested in two elements; The tradition of the memorial within the typology of "public art", and the spatialization of abstract GIS data within the public realm. Here are the boards from our charrette, which we have recently been informed will be included in the To Extremes exhibition at MIT on April 23. The accompanying text is below
A Line in the Sand, a Memorial to a Future is a proposal for a spatial intervention that draws from predictions for the Boston Harbor Association’s 2010 Sea Level Rise Forum, which indicated areas at risk for increased coastal flooding due to water level rise associated with global climate change. The intervention uses data and analysis generated by Chris Watson and Ellen Douglas of UMass Boston and Paul Kirshen of the University of New Hampshire (formerly from Battelle Institute).
By tracing the extent of the new floodlines onto the physical urban landscape, the aim is to bring the quantitative, geographic predictions something closer to a lived reality. We envision a demarcating line that reacts morphologically to the set of urban infrastructure it may encounter - asphalt streets, cobblestones alleys, concrete sidewalks, privates buildings, etc. The method of deployment references the tradition of the public memorial, whose spatial tactics in cases such as the Berlin Wall or battlefields and concentration camps across Europe conventionally include delineation and sanctification in an effort preserve the lived past. In contrast, A Memorial to a Future projects the anticipated upon the quotidian in a reminder to imagine the future. In this sense, via the act of tracing “a line in the sand”, A Memorial to a Future can also be understood as a performance.
From these anticipated geographies, a new cartography of Boston emerges. The historical Boston neck gives way and the Charles River basin reclaims its status as a brackish estuary. The historically isolated neighborhoods of the North End and South Boston reassert a geographic uniqueness after recent decades of integration and gentrification. As shown in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, ecological systems such as those taken into account by the Boston Harbor Association Sea Level Rise Forum, have profound cultural implications. A Memorial to a Future explores the ground of this rarely questioned disjuncture between the social and ecological.
