Mapping Meaning, the Journal (Issue No. 2)

Mapping Meaning, 

the Journal 

Issue N o 2 • Fall 2018

The contents of this publication are under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) unless 

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2 Mapping Meaning, the Journal

Design to impact change. 

Issue N o 2 

3

About 

Mapping Meaning, the Journal 

Minidoka Project Idaho 1918, 

Photo from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, of the U.S. Department of the Interior 


"824 Min Surveying 

party of girls on 

the Minidoka project." 

Original caption, 

National Archives 

How might interdisciplinary practices promote a 

reconsideration of the role that humanity plays in 

a more-than-human world? 

In a strongly fragmented and disciplined-based 

world, Mapping Meaning offers a collective 

space to imagine, create, and propose new 

models in the face of radical global change and 

ecological and social crises. Each issue takes 

up a particular theme and is edited by different 

curatorial teams from a variety of disciplines. 

All issues include the broadest possible calls for 

submission; gathering together divergent and 

experimental knowledge practices. Mapping 

Meaning, the Journal, is published two times 

per year. 

www.mappingmeaning.org 


5


Founding 

Editorial Board 

Melanie Armstrong 

Krista Caballero 

Nat Castañeda 

Sarah Kanouse 

Vasia Markides 

Jennifer Richter 

Carmina Sánchez-del-Valle 

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky 

Sree Sinha 

Trudi Lynn Smith 

Sylvia Torti 

Linda Wiener 

Toni Wynn 

The Honors College at the 

University of Utah serves as 

Mapping Meaning Journal’s 

partner and initial fiscal sponsor. 

Consistent with Mapping 

Meaning’s mentorship mission, 

the Journal is committed to 

publishing a breadth of work from 

those at all stages of their careers. 

Managing Editor: Sylvia Torti 

Artistic Director: Krista Caballero 

Visual Designer: Aliza Jensen 

Issue Editors: 

V.M. Price and C. Sánchez-del-Valle 


7

Content 

10 

Introduction 

V.M. Price and C. Sánchez-del-Valle, 

Issue #2 editors 

12 

Section 1: Community Ecology 

14 

Mapping for Social Change: Cartography 

and Community Activism in Mobilizing 

Against Colonial Gender Violence 

Annita Lucchesi 

22 

Borders Studio: Analyzing the U.S./ 

Mexico Border at a Borderland 

Institution Through an Architecture 

Design Studio 

Ane Gonzalez Lara 

40 

UO Black Cultural Center 

Daisy’Olice I. Williams 

50 

Section 2: Silent Spring 

52 

Deconstruct/Reconstruct: Out Finding 

Beauty within Invasive Plant Ecologies 

Megan Singleton 


62 

In the Pines: Mapping the Longleaf 

Anne Janine Lindberg 

74 

Section 3: Descent of Man 

76 

Plants and trees in urban landscapes: 

the counter-design of non-humans 

João Miguel Diógenes de Araújo Lima 

86 

All indifferent decay 

Caroline Clerc 

94 

Section 4: Regenesis 

96 

Homes 

MJ Tyson 

106 

Placing Inclusion Ahead 

Ileana Rodríguez 

112 

One to Another 

Sarawut Chituwongpeti 

122 

Conclusion 

Issue #2 editors 

Front and Back Cover Images, 

C. Sánchez-del-Valle 


9

Introduction to 


V.M. Price and C. Sánchez-del-Valle 

Make Me See Change Now: design to impact 

change 

“I sense that humans have an urge to map 

– and that this mapping instinct, like our 

opposable thumbs, is part of what makes us 

human.” - Katharine Harmon. [You Are Here: 

Personal Geographies and Other Maps 

of the Imagination. New York: Princeton 

Architectural Press. 2004.] 

As change is constant in our environments, 

design can steer change to more positive 

and less adverse consequences. It can be a 

deliberate execution of a plan to determined 

goals, or the plan itself. 

Design is both process and product. Yet, here 

is the paradox: because it exists in the space 

of the fuzzy, undetermined and uncertain 

problems, its results have desired as well as 

unexpected consequences. 

Submittals for this issue are maps of design 

for change in an environment. By “mapping” 

we mean that the reader can visualize not only 

what the work is, but what are its intentions 


Mapping Meaning, The Journal 

Introduction 

and consequences. The submissions 

are diverse in scale and outlook, from a 

specific design process, to work in or of the 

environment. They are contemporary, and 

challenge a narrow conception about design. 

The works offer critical consideration of 

design products and for acting through 

design to have direct ecological, social, 

cultural, emotive, or spiritual impact. 

There are new approaches, and unique 

perspectives. They argue for the necessity 

of other views and actions and spaces. 

They offer a thoughtful and constructive 

consideration of reality, as well as raise 

discomforting questions. 

They focus on environments that are internal 

and external, ranging from inside oneself, in 

the community, or across the globe; a place, 

ecosystem, community, or culture; or as a 

way of being or doing in service, operation, 

or action. 

different, unrecognized or unacknowledged. 

We have organized the works into clusters 

as we saw connections between them. 

The groupings are loose and fragile, but 

the threads that run through them give us 

opportunities for dialogue. We have used 

one of the author's works to title each 

section. For each section, we provide a brief 

statement highlighting what brings them 

together. 

“A fuller understanding of what we don’t 

know is itself new knowledge and redefines 

what we know.” - Pete Turchi. [Maps of the 

Imagination: the Writer as Cartographer; 

San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press. 

2004.] 

They respond to the dangers of an external 

or internal status quo for its complacency, 

unpreparedness, or resistance to the 


11

Mapping for Social Change 



Section 1: 

Community Ecology 

Left | Anne Janine Lindberg 

Community Ecology 2013 

Gouache and graphite on paper 

30” X 22” 

The cries of an ecology are often first heard as 

one is walking along its edges. The consequence of 

hearing and then choosing to listen is to map the 

problem for the rest of us to face, and act. 


13

Mapping for Social Change: 

Cartography and Community 

Activism in Mobilizing Against 

Colonial Gender Violence 


Annita Lucchesi is a doctoral student in the 

Cultural, Social, and Political Thought program at 

the University of Lethbridge, located on Treaty 7 

territory. She is a Southern Cheyenne descendant, 

and her ancestors made their home where the 

Rocky Mountains meet the Plains, in presentday 

Denver. She holds a BA in Geography from 

the University of California, Berkeley, and a MA 

in American Studies from Washington State 

University. Annita is the founder of the MMIW 

Database, a comprehensive data source on cases 

of missing and murdered indigenous women in 

the US and Canada, and her current academic 

research examines how community mapping 

projects can generate new knowledge and tell 

more holistic stories on such violence. In her work 

as a researcher and advocate, she frequently 

assists in community and policy responses to 

gender violence in indigenous communities, 

and leads workshops on indigenous and critical 

mapping. 

www.annitalucchesi.com 




Acknowledgements 

Abstract 

I acknowledge the Wiyot Nation, on whose 

lands I resided as a guest while writing this 

article, and the Blackfoot Confederacy, on 

whose territories I resided as a guest while 

developing the skirt map. Special néá’eše to 

Marisa Miakonda Cummings and Jackie Crow 

Shoe, who helped me to see that indigenous 

women have always been cartographers. 

On January 21, 2017, millions of people 

worldwide participated in the first annual 

Women’s March, and to commemorate its 

record-breaking participation and continued 

engagement with feminist issues, a second 

march was planned on January 20, 2018. This 

paper narrates the story of a project aimed 

at supporting and honoring activism to call 

attention to the issue of missing and murdered 

indigenous women (MMIW) at the global 2018 

Women’s Marches. In so doing, it traces the 

development of the project, and its transition 

from land-based activism, to map-making, and 

back to the MMIW movement again. This paper 

argues that such a process demonstrates the 

power of community-grounded, culturallysensitive 

cartography, and the role that 

maps can play in mobilizing and empowering 

communities to effect social change. 


15

Annita Lucchesi MMIW Map, 2018 




The Marches 

On January 21, 2017, over seven million 

people marched in the global Women’s 

March, in protest of the violent policies of the 

newly inaugurated Trump administration, 

and the myriad social and environmental 

injustices plaguing the world today. 

In Washington, D.C., it was the largest 

political demonstration on record, with 

estimates of anywhere between 500,000 and 

1,000,000 participants; and, over 5 million 

of the participants located elsewhere in the 

United States. To commemorate the march 

and build on its momentum, a second march 

was planned for January 20, 2018. 

In the 2017 Women’s March, Native American 

and indigenous women did participate— 

many traveled from remote locations to 

Washington, D.C. to do so. 

However, the 2018 Women’s March in Seattle 

reflected a turn to address the racial and 

colonial dynamics of mainstream feminism, 

by shifting leadership to local Native women, 

and including a call for justice for missing and 

murdered indigenous women (MMIW). 

be missing from the march as well, and how 

we might honor them. 

In 2015, I started a database of cases of 

MMIW in the US and Canada. By the time 

of the 2018 Women’s March, there were 

over 2,500 cases logged. So, I made a 

Facebook post offering march participants 

an opportunity to bring the database to the 

streets: anyone who agreed to carry a sign 

honoring a missing or murdered indigenous 

women from their city, area, or tribe would 

be sent a name that they alone would be 

responsible for carrying. 

By the time the march started, approximately 

120 names were disseminated across the US 

and Canada. Many of the people who asked 

to carry signs sent me photos of their signs, 

or of them carrying them. 

One of the signs, in honor of Nikita Wilson, 

a Choctaw woman who was murdered, is 

prominent in one of the now iconic photos of 

the Seattle Women’s March. 

I believe the spirits of these women would 

have been there, whether a sign was carried 

in their honor or not. 

At the time, I was living in Canada, and 

chronically ill. As an indigenous woman, 

an advocate for MMIW, and a community 

member, I wanted to contribute to the march 

in a meaningful way, but knew I could not 

physically be there. In feeling that sadness, 

that my body just was not able to be there in 

that moment, I began to think of all the other 

Native women and girls whose bodies would 

However, I also believe that the signs 

helped them to be strong in their presence, 

grounded the march participants in the work 

the march aimed to do, and served as a 

powerful reminder of the ways in which the 

loss of indigenous women pervades each 

community. 

There are women and girls whose voices 


17



There are women and girls 

whose voices deserved to be 

heard, whose contributions 

were missed, due to the 

colonial violence that took 

them from their families, 

communities, and nations. 




deserved to be heard, whose contributions 

were missed, due to the colonial violence that 

took them from their families, communities, 

and nations. 

This colonial violence is seen in myriad 

forms—police brutality, disproportionate 

rates of gender violence due to racial 

stereotypes and gaps in the justice system, 

the overrepresentation of indigenous girls in 

foster homes and in sex trafficking, and the 

imposition of a Western patriarchal system of 

power, for example. 

Each one of the signs called attention to that 

violence, and located it in specific places and 

in the lives of specific victims. 

As a cartographer, my current work 

examines how maps telling stories about 

MMIW can help to generate new knowledge 

on the issue, and offer a more holistic 

understanding of the impacts of such 

violence. Wanting the signs to tell a story of 

resilience and resurgence, and not just of 

loss, I created a map depicting where the 

signs were carried. 

There were a number of strategic choices 

made in the aesthetics of the map. First, it 

was drawn in the shape of a ribbon skirt—a 

cultural garment many indigenous women 

across the US and Canada wear at special 

events, ceremonies, community functions, 

and increasingly, at political actions. Indeed, 

ribbon skirts became commonplace at Idle 

No More protests, Women’s Marches, MMIW 

awareness events, and even at efforts to 

stand for water at Standing Rock. Different 

families and communities have varying 

teachings on the origins and meanings 

of ribbon skirts, but more generally, they 

are meant to represent the sacredness of 

women, the relationship women have to the 

earth, and the cultural vitality of indigenous 

women today. 

Designing the map in the shape of a skirt 

is in honor of these ideas and uses of the 

ribbon skirt, and takes inspiration from 

a popular form of public awareness on 

MMIW—symbolic displays of dresses, skirts, 

or women’s garments. 

Ribbon skirt by Marisa Miakonda Cummings 

The colors on the skirt are also meaningful. 

The body of the skirt is red, the primary color 

used in MMIW organizing, and the ribbon 


19



colors—red, blue, purple, teal, lavender, and 

pink—are the colors of awareness ribbon 

campaigns representing forms of violence 

common among MMIW, namely police 

brutality, sex trafficking, domestic violence, 

sexual assault, foster care, and violence 

targeting young girls. The background print 

of the skirt is a collage of photos of signs 

and march participants who carried them, 

underneath a textural pattern of the names 

of each of the women and girls who were 

carried. 

The map was initially published in a news 

article about the MMIW Database and my 

work, and ended up circulated on social 

media. In a surprising turn of events, women 

started creating real skirts, inspired by the 

skirt map, using the same design that the 

map depicts. 

Maps as Dresses, Dresses as Maps 

Inspired by the community response to the 

initial map, I made another Facebook call 

for help: sketch out a meaningful design 

representative of your nation’s women’s 

clothing, and I will transform it into a map 

telling stories of missing and murdered 

women from your community. 

From that post, the project has now grown 

to include dresses being designed in 

collaboration with six indigenous women 

artists and regalia makers, representing the 

Assiniboine, Ponca, Choctaw, Blackfoot, and 

Cheyenne peoples. 

It is my hope that as the map collection 

grows, more collaborations with artists from 

other nations are able to occur. 

Like the skirts that had inspired by the map, 

these new skirts were worn at ceremonies, 

powwows, community events, and political 

actions. 

A person I met in Montana mentioned she 

had seen one worn at Gathering of Nations 

Powwow in New Mexico. A colleague said 

she had seen one at ceremony in northern 

California. A friend in Maine commissioned 

one from another friend in Nebraska. 

The map, meant to honor the movement 

to end violence against indigenous women 

and girls, ended up becoming part of the 

movement. 

Though I did not expect the skirt map 

to be transformed into real skirts, upon 

reflection I came to understand the 

inherent connections between the two, and 

demonstrate the gap between the mediums 

are not as far as I had imagined. 

Fundamentally, both maps and ribbon 

skirts are storytelling devices. They connect 

our narratives and our bodies to the land 

we tread and communicate our sense of 

belonging and views of the world around us. 

They are visual representations of the social 

relations we are bound up in. 

Just as maps help us navigate and illuminate 

the geographies we traverse, ribbon skirts 

and the symbology embedded in their 




designs signal who we belong to, where we 

come from, and who we represent. 

In the case of the ribbon skirt map, the 

ribbon colors were a powerful representation 

of who we are accountable to as community 

members—indigenous victims of violence like 

police brutality and domestic abuse. 

While this project has demonstrated the 

unique connections between maps and 

ribbon skirts, it has also become an example 

of the power of community-grounded 

cartography. 

Moreover, by allowing the aesthetics of 

the map to be determined by community 

cultural practices and values, the map deeply 

resonated with its audience, and inspired 

continued engagement. 

In this way, this form of mapping is impactful 

in its reiterative contribution to a social 

movement, and provides a model for other 

cartographers who aim to utilize maps in 

their work to effect social change. 

By designing a mapping project that 

encouraged and empowered community 

members to participate in efforts to address 

an issue they were passionate about, the 

map became a mobilizing force for social 

change. 


21

Border Studio: Analyzing 

the U.S./Mexico Border at 

a Borderland Institution 

through an Architecture 

Design Studio 


Ane Gonzalez Lara is a designer with extensive 

experience in practice at a wide range of scales 

and project types in the U.S. and Europe. She 

has taught at the School of Architecture and 

Planning at UNM, and has been a partner at Idyll 

Architects, an architecture firm that operates 

between Albuquerque and Houston and between 

the real and the ideal. In Spring 2019 Ane will be 

teaching at Pratt Institute. 

Ane received her Master of Architecture from 

the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura 

Universidad de Navarra (ETSAUN). Previous 

to working at UNM, she worked in Houston, 

Germany and Spain. Her research focuses on the 

tectonics, assembly systems and materiality of 

contemporary Ibero-American architecture and 

on the U.S./Mexico border; while also exploring 

the relationship between space, geometry and 

materiality through her practice. 


Borders Studio 


Abstract: 

Boundaries and borders have generated 

much attention in the political realm of the 

U.S.A. over the last two years. The proposed 

Wall between the U.S.A. and Mexico has 

generated different responses from 

architects and builders across the country. 

Following this debate, a question arises: What 

is the role of architecture and architects on 

this issue? 

I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my 

words." 

Candidate Trump, 2015, “Full text: Donald 

Trump announces a presidential bid” The 

Washington Post, June 16th 2015 

The words quoted on this page were in 

the air when I was tasked to teach my first 

optional studio at the University of New 

Mexico (UNM) School of Architecture. 

This essay focuses on a Borders Studio 

taught at the University of New Mexico 

(UNM) School of Architecture. The studio 

was created after seeing how polarized and 

diverse the opinions about the proposed wall 

were among architects and builders, and to 

stimulate the critical thinking abilities of the 

students. 

The studio involved a series of projects that 

tackled different scales. Students found 

their own voices on the conflict during the 

semester, and the studio created a platform 

for them to bring issues like immigration, 

labor and politics to the classroom. 

This essay reflects on the students’ designs 

to create alternatives to the proposed wall 

focusing on the Chamizal parks in El Paso and 

Juarez. 

Introduction 

“I will build a great wall -- and nobody builds 

walls better than me, believe me --and I'll 

build them very inexpensively. I will build a 

great, great wall on our southern border, and 

With several ideas in mind about possible 

studios to teach - including the adaptive 

reuse of a historic building and a housing 

project - I couldn’t stop thinking and being 

terrified about the fact that architecture, as 

a profession, was not having a clear stance 

on the political conversations of the time, 

especially when discussing the construction 

of a wall. 

Days after President Trump was elected, the 

American Institute of Architects (AIA) issued 

its infamous message saying that “The AIA 

and its 89,000 members are committed 

to working with President-elect Trump 

to address the issues our country faces, 

particularly strengthening the nation’s aging 

infrastructure.” 1 

The message faced an incredible rejection in 

the social media and the hashtag #NotMyAIA 

filled the tweets and comments of a large 

number of AIA members. Six days after 

issuing the statement, AIA uploaded a video 

on their website saying that their original 

message was a mistake and it should have 

never happened. But after this controversy, 


23



the national AIA has yet to position itself in 

regards to this project. 

Neither has it responded to the resolutions 

that the AIA chapters of the border states of 

California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas 

have signed in opposition to the construction 

of the proposed wall. 

After much deliberation, I decided to embark 

on a journey to research the border and the 

architect's implication in geopolitical borders. 

In January 2017, I decided to launch the 

Borders Studio at UNM. 

When the name of the participants of the RFP 

was made public, some publications judged 

the ethics of the architects participating 

on these projects. These projects made 

clear that there is not a clear line dividing 

the ethicality and the anti-ethicality of 

participating in any of the calls mentioned 

above. So, as these conversations filled the 

news and architecture publications, I used 

these questions to shape the studio and the 

conversations that the students had during 

the semester. 

Borders Studio at UNM SAAP 

On February 2017, months after being 

elected, President Trump issued a Request 

for Proposals (RFP) “for the design and build 

of several prototype wall structures in the 

vicinity of the United States border with 

Mexico.” 2 This call had numerous responses 

within the architecture community and while 

some, like the Architecture Lobby, thought 

that architects shouldn’t take place in the 

construction of the wall by any means; 

others, like the firm JuneJuly, decided to take 

place on the call and submit a proposal. 

The RFP also generated a competition titled 

“Building The Border Wall”. This competition 

asked the participants to design a wall to stop 

flows of illegal immigration from entering the 

United States. The competition also faced 

some backlash and the organizers decided to 

add a question mark to the competition’s title 

to become “Building The Border Wall?” and 

also changed the brief to ask for a more open 

ended solution to the border. 

The University of New Mexico draws a large 

number of its students from the border 

region. More than 21,000 of the 30,000 

students enrolled at UNM call the border 

states of New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and 

California home. 3 

UNM is also a Hispanic Serving Institution, 

where 32.8% of the students at its main 

campus identify themselves as Hispanic. 

The first semester the studio was offered, 

seven students out of eleven were originally 

from the border region. Their knowledge 

and personal experiences of this region were 

invaluable to the development of the studio. 

Out of the eleven, nine spoke Spanish as 

their first language. The studio is currently 

taught in English as the primary language, 

but project reviews in Spanish are also 

offered to Spanish speaking students. 

Diversity is also sought at the public reviews 

that the students have during the semester. 




Guests from other UNM departments – 

politics, planning, law, landscape architecture 

and art¬– are invited to talk to the students 

during the semester. The participation of 

these guest reviewers generated some very 

interesting conversations with the students, 

who asked guests about their different 

perspectives, and engaged other fields in 

their proposals. 

The Borders Studio was divided into three 

main assignments and learning objectives. 

Each assignment required different 

approaches to the questions of geopolitical 

borders and architect’s agency on the issue. 

The last project focused on the Chamizal 

parks situated in El Paso and Juarez. 

The first assignment required students to 

engage in a thorough research of the U.S./ 

Mexico border and other international 

geopolitical boundaries. Some of the 

questions that they had to elaborate on were: 

What are the reasons stated by politicians for 

the wall to be needed? Why is there a heavy 

militarized concrete border with Mexico, and 

not with Canada? What are the implications 

that the wall will have for our country? 

After some weeks doing research, and having 

some very inspiring conversations, students 

were asked to put their findings in graphic 

Assignment 2, Ecotone diagrams and sections by Gonzalo Gonzalez and Jaziel Cervantes 


25






Assignment 1, 

Human Population and Natural Wildlife 

analysis by Gonzalo Gonzalez and Jaziel 

Cervantes. 


27



form. Divided in groups and focusing on 

the differences between the Mexico and 

Canada borders with United States, each 

group focused on one or two aspects of their 

research that they found more relevant. 

The topics analyzed this year were: 

militarization and agreements between the 

countries, human population and animal 

migration in North America, criminal activity 

on each border, physical geography and 

trade, travel and tourism. 

The students who focused on human 

population and animal migration along the 

border compared the traveling of animals 

through the U.S./Canada border and through 

the U.S./Mexico border. They also researched 

the flora and the animals that currently live 

on each border, and that would be affected 

by the construction of a wall. 

students shared their findings so all would 

have access to the different sets, and would 

overlay the different maps that each group 

created for this assignment. 

Following the first assignment, the students 

were asked to come up with alternatives to 

the existing fence and wall. This exercise was 

titled #ThisIsNotAWall. During this part of the 

studio, students engaged in conversations 

around the agency of architects on this 

conflict. They were also encouraged to 

think about their scope of work, not as 

a beautifying act, but as an exercise of 

critical engagement with the issue. After 

much debate and discussion of different 

ideas, students decided their level of critical 

engagement with the project: some decided 

to be more pragmatic and work within the 

existing constraints, while others decided to 

re-design the border itself. 

Once this research was completed, the 

One of the student’s proposals involved using 




Left | Assignment 2, 

"This Is Not a Wall" 

(detail) by Antonio 

Castañeda and Samuel 

Albert. 

Following | Chamizal 

dispute, existing 

conditions by Ane 

Gonzalez Lara. 

the existing fence as a green wall where 

citizens from both countries could harvest 

vegetables. Her proposal also used the green 

wall as a space activator, and as a tool to 

bring people from both sides together. 

Another student decided to picture what the 

future could look like if the wall was built 

and completed. The aim of his proposal, 

which had an apocalyptic tone, was to create 

awareness about the consequences that 

completing the wall would bring, and how 

possibly the people from the United States 

would be the ones taking the wall down over 

time. 

Other students designed a park system that 

would allow migratory birds to continue 

their path, and create an ecosystem for them 

along the border. This zone would only be 

inhabited by animals and would be a safe 

zone that would span along the entire border 

creating a wild refuge and ecotone along the 

border. Their proposal suggested a more 

gradual transitioning between each country 

where a wall and militarized techniques 

wouldn’t be necessary. 

Two students proposed a series of 

components for an infrastructure that would 

grow along the border on top of existing 

public buildings and open spaces. This 

infrastructure would host learning facilities 

such as universities, schools and career 

centers to host students from both sides of 

the border. The infrastructure would also 

allow for housing, public parks and plazas 

to exist along with the learning facilities. 

The ultimate goal of the proposal is for the 

border to disappear as the infrastructure 

grows. 

All the projects were also accompanied by 

a letter addressed to President Trump. The 

letter read as follows: 


29






President Trump, 

We already have a wall. 

A physical barrier marks 650 miles of our southern border. This boundary 

separates communities, disrupts ecosystems, and perpetuates a nationalist 

sense of entitlement that isolates the Land of Opportunity. Illegal 

immigration, job security, economic stability, drugs trafficking, crime, and 

terrorism are all real issues that we face as a nation, but none of them has 

been, or will be solved, by continuing to build walls. 

A border wall represents a medieval reaction to contemporary issues. It is one 

of the crudest tools available in the repertoire of geopolitics and is a blatant 

confession of failed diplomacy. If as a nation we continue to advocate for, 

and construct barriers between our neighbors, we fear that the world will do 

the same towards us. This rhetoric will cause The United States to isolate itself 

from the global community and retreat into a Land of Reclusion. Along this 

path we will lose our essence of diversity, optimism, and influence, defining 

characteristics that make our nation “great.” Instead of pushing forward 

a pledge to “build a wall,” we ask you to imagine our borderlands as an 

extension of the American narrative, as Lands of Opportunity. 

This is Not a Wall proposes a shared borderland, a series of infrastructural, 

community-specific, interventions that extend perpendicular to the current 

dichotomy of border conditions. Here, communities from the United States, 

Mexico, and Canada would grow naturally into one another, implementing 

programmatic components into an elevated framework that manifests 

around each location’s existing urban fabric. These interventions would 

be site-specific, allowing for the architecture to act as a mediator between 

nations, and address the complex issues within these borderland cities and 

the greater border condition. As each community reimagines the border as 

a shared, malleable, space, the rigid division inherent within a boundary 

and the idea of a “wall,” will dematerialize to create a seamless transition 

between nations. Within these shared spaces, architecture responds to the 

realities of disruption and separation by promoting bi-national “borderlands” 

of opportunity, rehabilitation, and growth – spaces where diversity brings us 

together instead of keeping us apart. 

As Americans, and as global citizens, our future depends on legitimizing and 

understanding coexistence. Our hope is that through reimagining the border 

as a series of bi-national communities, we will promote and amplify empathy, 

working towards shared solutions to social and economic equity, urban 

growth, healthcare, crime, and climate change within a world that will only 

continue to become more interconnected. 

Con amor, 

A Concerned and Optimistic Citizen & A Bi-National Citizen 


31



Left | Assignment 2, 

"This Is Not a Wall" by 

Antonio Castañeda 

and Samuel Albert. 

The process of writing and having to 

condense all their ideas in one page was a 

very interesting process. The students had to 

question their own decisions, analyze their 

thinking process and articulate their ideas 

concisely yet effectively. Even if the projects 

were very strong and full of energy, I have 

to admit that whenever a student would 

read a letter, it would be a very powerful 

moment, and maybe even the strongest act 

of resistance of all. During the third part of 

the semester, the students were asked to 

deploy their ideas with more resolution in the 

Chamizal Park. 

The Chamizal Park is a very unique park on 

the border. Chamizal El Paso and a Chamizal 

Juarez are currently divided by the border in 

El Paso and Juarez. This piece of land shifted 

from one side to the other of the boundary 

before the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo was forced 

into a cemented riverbed as it makes its way 

through El Paso and Juarez. 

The Chamizal is a piece of land that, in 1827, 

José Ponce de León was granted from the 

Mexican government. This land was on the 

south side of the Rio Grande. 

The years before 1864, the river slowly 

moved south. As a result of this process, the 

Chamizal moved to the El Paso side. In 1886, 

an exceptionally large flood aggravated this 

process. In 1897, the river flooded again 

creating what was known as the Cordova 

Island, which was actually a peninsula. 

In 1899, in order to avoid more floods, U.S. 

and Mexico split the cost of building an 

artificial cut in the heel of the horseshoe 

bend that formed the island. Once the cut 

was finished, Cordoba Island was still part of 

Mexican territory even if it was surrounded 

by U.S. soil and the Rio Grande on its south. 

Cement boundary markers were built at 

the original river bed to set the geopolitical 

boundary. These markers can still be found 




at the Chamizal National Memorial in El 

Paso. 

home value, and forced to leave their houses 

behind. 

Until 1963, different presidents tried to 

solve the issue without success. On January 

14,1964, United States and Mexico signed 

an agreement to set the new boundary 

and channelize the river in order to stop 

its fluctuation. “The agreement awarded 

to Mexico 366 acres of the Chamizal area 

and seventy-one acres east of the adjacent 

Cordova Island.” 4 

This shifting of the land also meant that 

the nationality of those living in this area 

changed as the river meandered. The settling 

of 1968 meant that houses that were on the 

American side of the border, were now on 

the Mexican side. The owners of properties 

in the Chamizal were given the option of 

continuing being American, or becoming 

Mexican. Those who decided to be American 

were only paid for their land and not for their 

Nowadays, the U.S. side of the park is not a 

very active, nor a celebrated space. On a field 

trip visit to the U.S. side of the Chamizal, the 

park was hardly populated and the Chamizal 

Memorial Center was closed. 

On the other hand, the Mexican side of the 

park is greatly used by the neighbors of the 

area. The park is the biggest public space 

in Juarez, and it contains an archeology 

museum. During the weekends, the park is 

activated by performances, street vendors, 

joggers and families. It seems as if the park 

acts like a showcase of the vibrancy of the 

Mexican communities on the southern side 

of the wall, as if they are trying to show that 

the grass might be greener on their side. 

The history and current use of this fluctuating 

place created the perfect backdrop for some 

Right | Chamizal 

dispute, meandering 

of the Rio Grande by 

Ane Gonzalez Lara. 


33



Assignment 3, Border Fluctuation by Eli Helbig and Jacob Lovato. 





35



As architects, I believe 

that we should be aware of 

the systems that operate 

within our practice and 

define our role within 

these realities. Thinking 

that architecture is an 

isolated field in charge of 

beautifying structures will 

cause more problems, and 

won’t help us create more 

equitable environments. 




of the proposals that the students created 

for the park. The third assignment was titled 

#ThisIsNotAWall Chamizal Park. For this 

exercise, the students had to develop the 

concepts described in the second proposal 

in a more detailed manner. The students 

also decided whether to work individually, or 

in groups of two. The results of their projects 

had to be presented in graphically on boards 

along with a 500-word description. 

This exercise allowed for the proposals to 

become more meaningful. Although the 

scale of the park is relatively big for an 

architecture studio, going from a broad 

proposal to a more detailed one enabled 

the students to create more thoughtful 

proposals. 

One proposal re-designed both Chamizal 

parks so that the river would be allowed to 

meander again. This public space would shift 

nationalities as needed by each country, 

allowing for Mexico or U.S. to use the land 

for big events. The design also allowed for 

the river to flow creating a configuration that 

would allow both nationalities to use the 

park. The description of this project titled 

Border Fluctuation read: “Once the river is 

unleashed from its concrete channel and is 

allowed to fluctuate and once again engage 

the flood plains upon which it exists, new 

environments emerge and migrate within 

the meandering of the river. Here, spatial 

identities start to emerge and can begin 

to stitch the cultural and political fabric of 

both the U.S. and Mexico into the future; 

where the static border becomes more of 

a permeable boundary meant to offer new 

and exciting social opportunities through the 

'natural' shifting of the river, as it once was.” 

Since the project had a very optimistic 

approach, the students also decided to use a 

non-realistic representation of their project. 

Another student proposed to use some of 

the existing wall infrastructure to create 

a green wall that would allow growing 

vegetables on both sides of the wall. She 

also proposed that in some areas the green 

wall would be thickened allowing for the wall 

to become a threshold, a thickened wall that 

is also inhabitable. 

Her proposal in the Chamizal allowed for 

people from both sides to get to see each 

other, interact and have a common project: 

a garden that both sides would have to 

take care of. Her project emphasized the 

disconnection that currently exists between 

both Chamizal parks and the people from 

each side of the border. 

Conclusion 

There was a clear evolution in the work of 

the students and their mindset throughout 

the semester. The students who took 

the studio were unsure in the beginning 

about the approach that they should take 

with their proposals, and some were even 

afraid of them being too provocative. But 

at the end of the semester, the students 

challenged each other’s points of views and 

asked each other to be more provocative 

and raise awareness on the conflict through 

their projects, letters and representation 


37



techniques. 

After finalizing the studio, some students 

decided to continue their work and 

research. Some started the Twitter account 

This Is Not A Wall at the end of the semester 

to follow the discussions on border projects 

and architecture through social media. One 

student designed a portable shelter that 

people crossing the border can carry with 

them to protect them from the sun, and be 

used as shelter at night. Another student is 

currently researching the Bracero Program 

and how it impacted the growth of small 

settlements along the U.S. and Mexico 

border. 

As architects, I believe that we should be 

aware of the systems that operate within 

our practice and define our role within 

these realities. Thinking that architecture 

is an isolated field in charge of beautifying 

structures will cause more problems, 

and won’t help us create more equitable 

environments. 

Maybe one of the beauties of architecture 

is its unlimited options, but in the same way 

that we discuss beauty and composition in 

studio classes, we should have moral and 

ethical conversations in the classroom. 

Perhaps our studios, and architectural 

education in general, are too naïve: hardly 

talking about how projects would be 

financed, the impact that they would have 

on the surrounding houses and neighbors, 

the economy that they tap into... 

I think that the projects produced at 

the Borders Studio could be considered 

somewhat naïve, but working on these 

projects generated long conversations about 

ethics, politics, economy and architecture. It 

has also given confidence to students living 

in a borderland region to think that their 

voice can be heard, and that as architects, 

they should be included in conversations 

beyond aesthetics. 

The goal of studios like this one is not to 

create a set of ethical rules that all designers 

and architects must adhere to, nor to 

shame those with different ethical rules 

than ours, but to start generating some 

individual ethical parameters for students 

to help them define the work that they 

feel comfortable doing. The goal is also 

for the students to start questioning the 

involvement that architects should have on 

these types of conflicts, and hopefully make 

them aware of their own responsibilities 

when leaving school and facing real projects 

and clients. 

Endnotes 

1 American Institute of Architects. 2016, December 1. Open 

letter to members and friends of the international AIA 

National Region. Accessed on September 4, 2017 from 

http://www.aiainternational.org/home/2016/12/1/openletter-to-members- 

and-friends-of-the-aia-international. 

html 

2 Federal Business Opportunities. (2017, February 24). RFP. 

Retrieved September 4, 2017, from https://bit.ly/2lDXj9z 

2 Office of Sponsored Projects, University of New Mexico, 

http://osp.unm.edu/hsi-mi-reference-overview.html 

Accessed on May 13th 2018 

3 Office of Institutional Analytics, University of New Mexico, 

http://oia.unm.edu, Accessed on May 13th 2018 




4 Gregory, Gladys and Liss, Sheldon, “Chamizal Dispute” 

Texas State Historical Association, https://tshaonline.org/ 

handbook/online/articles/nbc01, Accessed on May 13th 

2018 

5 “Where History and Culture Come to Life”, Chamizal National 

Memorial website National Parks Service website, https:// 

www.nps.gov/cham/index.htm?allacrosstexas.com, 

Accessed on May 13th 2018 

References 

American Institute of Architects, New Mexico Chapter. (2017, 

September 19). Resolution on Alternatives to the Border 

Wall, Passed. Retrieved from http://aianewmexico.org/ 

Documents/BorderWall_Resolution091917.pdf 

"Cordova Island", Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State 

Historical Association. June 12, 2010. https://tshaonline. 

org/handbook/online/articles/rrc04 Accessed on May 13th 

2018 

“Floods and The Chamizal Issue” National Park Service, 

February 24 2015, https://www.nps.gov/cham/learn/ 

historyculture/rio-grand-floods-and-the-chamizal-issue. 

htm, Accessed on May 13th 2018 

Friedman, Nathan, “Political Props Territorial Performance 

and the Chamizal Dispute” Mas Context, http://www. 

mascontext.com/tag/chamizal-treaty/ Accessed on May 

13th 2018 

Korody, Nicholas, “US/Mexico border wall competition 

provokes controversy” Bustler, (March 16, 2017). http:// 

bustler.net/news/tags/competition/326/4754/ usmexico-border-wall-competition-provokes-controversy/ 

competition-news Accessed September 4, 2017 

Lambert, Leopold, “The New York Times and The U.S. 

Border Wall: A Love Story”, The Funambulist, https:// 

thefunambulist.net/architectural-projects/the-new-yorktimes-and-the-u-s-border-wall-a-love-story 

Accessed May 

13th 2018 

NPR Staff, “50 Years Ago, A Fluid Border Made The U.S. 1 

Square Mile Smaller” NPR Radio Diaries, September 25th 

2014, https://www.npr.org/2014/09/25/350885341/50- 

years-ago-a-fluid-border-made-the-u-s-1-square-milesmaller 

Accessed May 13th 2018 

Miranda, Carolina A., “Trump’s border wall may be 

controversial, but some Southern California firms want 

to build it”. Los Angeles Times, (March 2, 2017). http:// 

www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-camborder-wall-presolicitation-vendors-20170302-story.html 

Accessed May 13th 2018 

The Architecture Lobby, #NotOurWall Campaign http:// 

architecture-lobby.org/project/notourwall/ Accessed May 

13th 2018 

Rael, Ronald. Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the 

US-Mexico Boundary. University of California Press, 2017. 

International Boundary and Water Commission, City of El Paso 

Department of Planning, National Park Service 


39



Daisy-O’lice I. Williams is an Assistant Professor in 

the Department of Architecture at the University 

of Oregon. Over the course of her career, she 

has taught design communication, architectural 

theory, and design studio at the beginning and 

graduate levels. Her research and teaching is 

driven by the underlying assumption that what 

we use to design influences what we are able 

to design. Williams specializes in architectural 

visualization, and is particularly interested in 

modes of communication that directly engage the 

human experience. Recent investigations include 

the role of digital collage in the student design 

process and the viability of augmented reality as 

a collaging medium. Williams is also committed 

to investigating and increasing African-American 

presence and participation in architectural 

education. 




"To be in the margin is to be 

part of the whole but outside the 

main body." bell hooks 

“I need to understand how a place 

on the map is also a place in 

history…” Adrienne Rich, Notes Towards a 

Politics of Location 


41



Left | Zachariah 

Petett’s 3D “Final 

Program” diagram: 

Critical analysis that 

plots programmatic 

components based 

on necessary square 

footage and necessary 

privacy, noise, and 

access levels. 

In the fall of 2015, the University of Oregon 

Black Student Task Force published a plan 

outlining twelve demands to “ensure that 

current and future Black students have a 

culturally appropriate and welcoming campus 

climate”. The seventh on their list required 

the university to “create a substantial 

endowment fund and support system to 

FUND AND OPEN a Black Cultural Center”. 

As a result of the taskforce’s activism and 

labor, the University of Oregon will welcome 

a new Black Cultural Center to campus with 

construction slated to begin in 2018. 

This design studio was created as a means to 

study the intellectual implications of such an 

undertaking. 

Working from the assumption that 

architecture is a form of cultural production, 

is it possible to achieve an architectural 

embodiment of ‘blackness’? 

Is this a noble design pursuit or a one-way 

ticket to superficial essentialism? Like all 

ventures by a state-funded institution, one 

has to answer, for whose benefit is this? 

What is the role (or perhaps responsibility) 

of a black cultural center on a mostly 

white campus in an even more racially 

homogeneous state? 

The goal of this studio was not to mimic 

the actual project in process or scope 

(though rich lessons were learned from it 

along the way). We had the advantage of 

suspending real-world limitations of budget 

and time. Therefore, our studio worked 

from an expanded program with a focus on 

university-community partnership. 

Our aim was to envision a UO Black Cultural 

Center situated to support both the campus 

and region 50 years from now. Our studio’s 




proposed Center needed to fulfill dual needs: 

to be a nucleus for black student life on 

campus, and offer support to community 

groups who provide critical programming for 

the study, preservation, and advancement of 

black traditions and heritage. 

In addition to student support and event 

space, our program included community 

gathering rooms, permanent exhibit space, 

a rotating gallery, reflection space, and 

a studio/office for a scholar in residence 

program. Many student projects pushed 

the civic possibility of the center further by 

incorporating performance theaters and 

special collections archives. 

Our project occupies the same site as 

the real UO Black Cultural Center project 

with extended boundaries that could 

accommodate a larger program and provide 

conditions that speak to the public nature of 

the proposed facility. 

The corner site is located at the eastern 

margins of campus, marking a clear transition 

between campus buildings and residential 

neighborhood. It is an edge condition that 

will someday become a prominent formal 

gateway into campus as new projects 

continue to be developed. Primary building 

uses within this area include residence halls 

and academic support facilities. 

However, this area is in the beginning stages 

of what could be nudged into becoming a 

cultural “district” for the University, with the 

Many Nations Long House, Global Scholars 

Residence Hall, and the Museum of Natural 

and Cultural History to its immediate west, 

and Maude Kerns Art Gallery to its east. 

The Mathew Knight Arena is also in close 

proximity to the north and visible from our 

site. 

Given the transitional nature of the site, 

students were asked to propose a redesigned 

Right | Jennah Byrd_ 

Approach: The 

building is bisected 

into two volumes, with 

civic functions like the 

museum and archives 

housed in a larger 

mass that lifts up at the 

corner and reaches out 

toward the city. 


43



East Campus Design Area Plan that clarified 

pedestrian and vehicular access as well as 

green space. 

Student projects had to respond to the dual 

purposes of serving as a student support 

space and as a multiuse civic building. Thus, 

students had to consider a radiating sphere 

of users with needs of black students at the 

core, and the general public at the broadest 

scope. 

One of the inherent challenges of the project 

required students to consider how to provide 

refuge to a subset of the student population 

who often feel marginalized and unsafe, 

while also offering an intentional interface for 

education and sharing. Thus, many schemes 

made clear divisions in building mass, entry 

sequence and façade treatments to convey 

this shifted notion of public vs. private. 

The greater purpose of our studio was to 

investigate ways in which architectural design 

acts as an extension of cultural production. 




Gianna Prather’s board layouts: This proposal by Gianna Prather integrates building with landscape, encouraging pedestrians to 

walk through the project site and engage the center along a choreographed exterior path. The grand scale of the project is offset 

by moments for pause and reflection along the way. 


45



U.S. university campuses; and museums that 

center African American history. 

The campus buildings selected included the 

Museum of Natural and Cultural History 

for its public educational function; and 

the Many Nations Longhouse and John E. 

Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes 

because each offer targeted support for 

unique subsets of the student population. 

This study proved useful in understanding 

how current UO buildings offer cultural 

programming to the general public while 

also restricting circulation via identity-based 

layers of access. 

Zacharia Petett's Vignette: Renderings reveal the sculptural 

quality of the proposal with sweeping forms that surround a 

“sacred” rotunda at its core. 

Specifically, our work probed the intersection 

of black aesthetics, architecture, and identity. 

We operated from the notion that every 

building is a thesis. Therefore, students were 

invited to place a great deal of intention into 

forming their rationale based on case study 

analysis. 

The studio was broken into groups that 

were assigned three different categories 

of buildings for study: select UO campus 

buildings; other Black Cultural Centers on 

From the list of BCCs provided to them, 

students analyzed the Neal Marshall Black 

Culture Center at Indiana University, the 

Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at 

Oregon State University, and the Frieson 

Black Cultural Center at the University of 

Tennessee at Knoxville. These centers ranged 

in size and scope of programming. 

Aside from the spatial programming and 

siting, students wanted to know how and to 

what degree was the function of the facility 

evident in its design and how much did that 

design diverge from the campus vernacular. 

The museums analyzed included: the 

Museum for African Art/ The Africa Center, 

in Queens, N; the National Center for Civil 

and Human Rights in Atlanta, GA; and the 

Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland 

African American History and Culture in 

Baltimore, MD. 




Assuming larger budgets and heavier roles 

as national civic institutions, students 

documented how cultural meaning 

presented itself in the aesthetic design of the 

project as intended by the lead architect. 

This distinction is critical. As with many 

noteworthy buildings, it becomes difficult to 

find information on how these intentions are 

shared, understood, or even realized by its 

occupants and visitors. 

In order to help us sift through the complex 

task of imagining a meaningful relationship 

between architectural space and black 

identity, we engaged written works by 

prominent scholars often grouped in pairs to 

express alternative views. 

Memory. They posit (albeit for different 

purposes) that lived experience and 

perception begins within the body. At a 

glance, the studio projects were quite diverse 

in their appearance. Those shown here are 

perhaps some of the most gestural of the 

group—they reach, stretch, lean, curve, 

and swoop. However, not all of the projects 

were so formally bold. Some intentionally 

deferred to their surroundings and employed 

more modest forms that sheltered dramatic 

interiors. 

While a few students did engage metaphor to 

draw out formal ideas about building mass 

To begin, we compared Jack Travis’ Notes on 

a Black Architectural Aesthetic against Mario 

Gooden’s The Problem with African American 

Museums. Travis’ slow-grown, near manifesto 

of principles that define a black aesthetic was 

challenged by Gooden’s critique of the use of 

“cultural stereotypes”. 

Later in the term, when students were asked 

to design “sacred space” within the project, 

we paired TaNehisi Coates’ Between the 

World and Me, with bell hooks’ “Homeplace: 

A Site of Resistance” in Yearning in order 

to draw out ways that architecture and 

place become protective skins that mediate 

“otherness”. 

These were later followed by Juhani 

Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin, and Norle 

Lokko’s “Body.Memory.Map” in Sites of 

Jennah Byrd's Vignette: “Sacred space” for reflection shaped 

by outdoor sculpture park made of perforated corten steel 

panels that cast and receive patterns of light on their surface 

indicating the passage of time. The collage-like textural quality 

of this image captures the emotive quality of the space. 


47



and materiality, the entire studio seemed to 

see the physical expression of the building as 

secondary to the choreographed experience 

it would provide. Materiality, texture, color, 

shape, and volume were manipulated— 

but not to represent something else (like 

blackness, justice, community, the pacific 

northwest, etc.). 

Instead, architectural elements were 

modified to shape particular experiential 

moments guided by the perception of light, 

sound, gravity, scale and movement. Though 

these two design approaches aren’t mutually 

exclusive, our group tended to be motivated 

by achieving some sensory or emotive 

outcome rather than engaging a cultural 

signifier. 

Overwhelmingly, students were skeptical 

that a specific brick pattern, color scheme, 

or volumetric shape would be enough 

to carry the weight of shared meaning. 

Above all, this studio project was inherently 

political. The ordering of space, people, and 

property always is. However, this project 

tested the limits of our training, identity, and 

experience. Most of the readings were new 




Zachariah Petett’s 3D “Concept” diagram: Generative form diagrams that explore expressions of power, sanctuary, and 

community through building mass. 

text and territory for architectural design 

students. As a group we journeyed without 

the expectation that any of us would arrive 

at a codified black aesthetic. Instead, our 

context-heavy investigations ended up 

providing a deep dive into user experience. 

Most students came into this studio with the 

expectation that the Black Cultural Center 

should be more than just another campus 

building in whatever ways that meant to 

them. By studio’s end, projects translated 

that desire by compelling a dialogue between 

normative campus design strategies and the 

ever self-aware black student experience. 


49




Section 2: 

Silent Spring 


Silent Spring 2013 Gouache and 

graphite on paper 30” X 22” 

Surprisingly, analyzing and mapping the 

devastation of an ecosystem may very well lead 

in a positive direction. These articles recognize 

and map our shared creative destruction, but hint 

at new paths to make and take for its repair or 

transition. 


51


Deconstruct/ Reconstruct: 

Out Finding Beauty within 

Invasive Plant Ecologies 


Left | Megan Singleton 

Here and There, 2017 

Handmade Paper of Kozo, 

dyed with Indigo, Persicaria, 

and Oklahoma Soil 

10 Panels, Each Panel 2' X 4' 

Megan Singleton is an artist and educator located 

in St. Louis, Missouri. Her ecology-based work 

crisscrosses the boundaries of contemporary 

craft combining sculpture, hand papermaking, 

installation, and digital applications. She received 

her MFA in Sculpture from Louisiana State 

University and BFA in Photography from Webster. 

She exhibits nationally and internationally 

and her work can be found in the collections 

of the Louisiana Art and Science Museum, the 

Robert C. Williams Paper Museum, as well as 

numerous private and corporate collections. She 

teaches Fiber Arts at Saint Louis University and 

papermaking workshops nationally. She has 

been the recipient of a $20,000 Artist Fellowship 

from the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, 

the Smelser Vallion Visiting Artist Fellowship in 

Taos, NM, and the Kingsbrea International Artist 

in Residence in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick. 

In 2017, she was commissioned to create sitespecific 

mural projects at the Granoff Center 

at Brown University for the T2 Art initiative at 

Lambert International Airport in Saint Louis. 

www.megansingleton.com 


53

Deconstruct/Reconstruct 



A Creative Process 





55



A Creative Process 

Paddling through vegetation-filled bayous, 

hiking along riparian trails, or trekking 

along a sandy coastline examining plants 

for their potential to be transformed into 

handmade paper, is key to my creative 

process. This process, by nature, is designed 

to be stimulating, inspiring, and enjoyable. 

The exploration of diverse biomes across 

the country invigorates my artistic practice 

and informs the direction of my botanical 

research. The experience of navigating 

through new landscapes is always full of 

surprises and intriguing observations. Using 

contemporary place-based methodologies 

coupled with the historic craft of hand 

papermaking, I have designed a fivepoint 

practice to utilize when embarking 

on investigating a new landscape and 

creating new bodies of work. It begins with 

Exploration. 

Exploration 

Then, I begin planning my excursions and 

organizing the necessary tools, permits, 

and equipment, such as a canoe, that I 

may need to collect plant samples. Nothing 

compares to being fully immersed in a wild 

natural environment. I arrive with intent and 

am constantly stimulated by the shifting, 

interconnected relationships of the plants 

and ecosystems that I observe around me, 

which leads us right into my next point. 

Observation 

Out in the field, I am looking, listening, 

smelling, and touching all the things around 

me. I record my observations in a field 

journal and with my camera. Photography 

plays an important role in the development 

of ideas and in the interpretation of 

experiences. I use the photographs I 

take to develop sculptural forms, as well 

as printed and bound in artist books as 

companion pieces to further contextualize 

my installations. 

Curiosity is the impetus for exploration. I find 

myself drawn, physically and metaphysically, 

to areas where a body of water plays 

a dominant role in the landscape. My 

explorations, like most, begin with maps 

of the location I will be traveling to. I look 

for public land managed by the Bureau of 

Land Management (BLM), the National Parks 

Service (NPS), or State Parks with navigable 

and accessible trails. I also look at satellite 

imagery of the areas I plan to go to get a 

sense of the density of the vegetation, as well 

as trail and road conditions. 

Over the years, I have observed the 

destructive beauty of various invasive species 

such as the seas of purple blossoms of water 

hyacinth choking Louisiana bayous, and the 

lyrical swaying swaths of common reed along 

the shores of Monomoy Island. 

When I am looking at these plants as 

potential paper, I am seeking invasive species 

that are herbaceous, non-woody and have 

a high cellulose fiber content. I do a “twist 

test” on site to determine the strength of a 

plant material’s fiber by taking a clipping and 

literally twisting the fiber as many times as I 




can before it breaks. The results of this test 

determines whether I will take the plant back 

to the studio for further material research. 

Research 

Research is a critical component of my studio 

practice. This includes searching for historical 

data about specific locations, discovering how 

certain plants were introduced into a region, 

and how the biodiversity has been affected 

since the introduction of an invasive species. 

The physical, material research includes 

processing plant fibers down to just cellulose 

and testing the plants viability to be made 

into paper. Not all the plants I experiment 

with end up as great candidates for paper, 

but that doesn’t mean they still can’t be used. 

The fiber may be too weak, too woody, or not 

contain enough cellulose for pure sheets, but 

it may have an interesting texture, color, or 

be significant in the conceptual component 

of the work. 

When this is the case, I will mix the plant 

with another fiber such as abaca or cotton, 

to create the necessary pulp recipe for the 

application I am using it for in the studio. 

Which brings us to Interpretation, aka, 

making ideas into objects. 

Interpretation (aka Making) 

The work I create is place-based, inspired 

Megan Singleton Turions: Wintering Buds, 2017 

Handmade Paper of Abaca, Milfoil, Hydrilla, and Grass, Steel, Concrete 27 Sculptures Dimensions Variable 


57

Plants and trees in urban landscapes 






59



by a desire to interpret the landscapes of 

disrupted, invaded ecologies and natural 

phenomena. I create sculptural installations 

by deconstructing plant material down to a 

visceral pulp slurry, then I reconstruct the 

fibers into paper sculptures that interpret 

and abstract the plant forms that I have 

observed. Paper pulp is such a versatile 

media, it can be used to make sheets 

of paper for a book, wrapped around 

armatures to create sculpture, or cast into 

the landscape itself. 

I have an expertise in hand papermaking 

and utilize my knowledge of the craft’s 

traditions to create work in a contemporary 

context that transforms invasive plant fibers 

into works of art. This decisive material 

selection lets me physically embed elements 

of regional specificity and conceptual 

implications into my art. 

The process of collection and transformation 

honors the plants as living organisms, while 

simultaneously engaging and educating 

viewers about the importance of invasivespecies 

awareness. 

Conversation 

The culmination of my explorations, 

observations, research, and interpretations 

is an exhibition of my labors that aims to 

spark conversation. I use the subversive 

power of seductively beautiful objects to 

draw a viewer in, resulting in questions and 

a desire for further inquiry. 




Left | Megan Singleton, 

Riparian Threads: 

Cimarron Watershed 2017 

Handmade Paper of Abaca, 

Hydrilla, Prairie Grass and 

Oklahoma Soil 

30' X 10'. 

Previous | Megan 

Singleton, Fluvial Terra 

(Installation View) 

Below | Megan Singleton, 

Riparian Threads (detail) 

The intent of my work is to create an 

overlapping dialogue between art, science, 

and ecological concerns corresponding 

to both the alchemical processes I use to 

create art, and to the idea that exploration 

and collaboration can lead to new 

perceptions of our landscape and land 

stewardship. In addition, I hope that my 

work inspires individuals to embark on their 

own explorations into the wilderness, to be 

out finding beauty. 


61


IN THE PINES: 

Mapping the Longleaf 



Green Painting 2014 Oil on 

canvas 46” X 35” 

Anne Lindberg grew up in the suburbs of 

Chicago and is currently a visual artist living 

and working in Wilmington, North Carolina. A 

painter primarily, Anne has exhibited in Chicago 

and St. Louis at galleries and museums including 

the Des Lee Gallery in St. Louis, the Foundry Art 

Center in St. Louis, and the Kemper Museum of 

Contemporary Art in St. Louis. Anne is currently 

a full time faculty member at the University of 

North Carolina Wilmington. She holds a Master’s 

Degree in Visual Art from the Sam Fox School 

at Washington University in St. Louis and a 

Bachelors of Fine Art from the University of Illinois 

Champaign-Urbana. 

www.annejlindberg.com 


63

In the Pines 

Anne J. Lindberg 

Having moved from the Midwestern United 

States to the southeastern United States 

in 2013, this work was inspired by my 

experience of coming to a new place trying 

to get a sense of it. I focus on the longleaf 

pine ecosystem, a rich forest type that once 

dominated the entire southeastern United 

States. I present the forest, or the idea of the 

forest, through a mixture of representational 

imagery and imagery that represents 

information: species distribution maps, maps 

of turpentine distilleries at the turn of the 

century, hexagonal grid mapping techniques, 

etc. The title of these collection of works, in 

the pines, refers to the title of a traditional 

southern Appalachian folk song from the 

1870’s. 

The longleaf pine forest is important and 

distinctive. 

Once the most extensive woodland ecosystem 

in the United States, the longleaf pine forest 

extended from Virginia to eastern Texas. 

It has contributed to the economic and cultural 

development of the United States and has 

suffered extreme loss as a result. 

As of 1996 only 2.95 of the original 92 million 

acres remain, mostly in fragments. 


Greenswamp Pinecone (burnt), 2014. Oil on linen 10” X 15” 




Anne Janine Lindberg (top to bottom) 

Remnants, 2015. Gouache on paper, 22” X 29 ¾”; GIS Drawing 2, 2015. Graphite on paper 26 1/4” X 40 ¼” 


65






The longleaf pine forest is also 

one of the most biologically 

diverse ecosystems on earth with 

a number of species uniquely 

endemic to it, many of them 

considered rare or endangered. 

Left | Anne Janine Lindberg, 

Broken Corridors, 2014 

Mixed media on paper 

30” X 44” 


67






The gopher tortoise, Venus flytrap, 

flameflower, Red-cockaded 

Woodpecker, and other species 

live solely within this ecosystem 

and nowhere else on earth. 

These and other endemic species 

indicate not only the biological 

diversity, but also the biological 

uniqueness of the region. 

Left | Anne Janine Lindberg, 

Black Hexagons, 2014 


30” X 44” 


69



There are currently many efforts 

underway to restore the longleaf 

pine ecosystem where it still 

exists. 

. 

Right | Anne Janine Lindberg, 

Death by a Thousand cuts, 2014 


30” X 44” 





71



This body of work was created 

in 2015. 

This work is meant to address 

loss, fragmentation, and 

extinction; forces that are 

becoming increasingly prevalent 

in our time. 

Right | Anne Janine Lindberg, 

Heyday, 2014 


30” X 44” 





73




Section 3: 

Descent of Man 


Descent of Man 2013 


30” X 22” 

The ecological road taken downward is often the 

byproduct of other good intentions. Nonetheless, 

the devastation is there. These two articles map 

the consequences of not paying attention to the 

edges going ragged around us. 


75


Plants and trees in urban 

landscapes: the counterdesign 

of non-humans 


Left | João Miguel Diógenes 

de Araújo Lima 

2018 

João Miguel Lima has a MSc in Sociology from 

the Federal University of Ceara, Brazil, and is 

a member of the Arts and Urban Micropolitics 

Laboratory at the same institution. His research 

on the relations of humans and non-humans in 

the urban Anthropocene combines Social Sciences 

and the Arts. He has explored different publishing 

formats: paper, zine, photo-essay, and a short 

story. 

http://cargocollective.com/joaomiguellima/ 


77



Does nature need human activism to speak 

and act on its behalf – or does nature have 

agency? Here the intent is to address this 

question by looking at urban plants. Not 

trees, not forests, but weeds, the most 

undesirable kind of urban plants. Walking 

and roaming through urban space, one 

may overlook them bursting through the 

cracks on the sidewalk, between bricks on 

a wall, in a gutter or even the rooftop – but 

there they are. Perceived as signs of urban 

decay, weeds are usually pulled out. They 

are not ‘supposed to be’ there. Weeds and 

their urban counter-design has become the 

subject of photographers all around the 

world. Inspired by ecological criticism, this 

research takes shape as an online museum 

of the ephemeral, contributing with insights 

about the environment in cities. 

Thoreau argued that, even though cities had 

pushed wilderness away to places where it 

could only be visited and contemplated, man 

is an inhabitant of nature nonetheless, and 

thereby remains a part of it. 

Cities then, are not ‘unnatural environments’ 

(Spirn 1996), but are transformations and 

restrictions of nature by men. 

This narrative begins with reflections 

that question my own experience in 

environmental activism. 

In 2013, the municipal administration 

of Fortaleza, Brazil launched an urban 

intervention project to alleviate traffic jams 

by constructing roadway bypasses. To make 

room for the bypasses, 94 trees of the 

neighboring Cocó Ecological Park would be 

cut down. 

When workers cut a couple of trees to the 

ground, a group of demonstrators managed 

to halt the process, access the site and throw 

red paint over the tree stumps. 

Right | A portion of the 

municipality of Fortaleza, 

capital of the state of Ceará, in 

Northeastern Brazil, with the 

green mangroves of the Cocó 

River. The highlighted area 

indicates where the overpasses 

were built, in a junction. 

Captured using Google Maps 




Photographs of this action circulated online 

and in different means of communication, 

igniting protests 1 and shortly thereafter an 

occupation 2 . These protest actions were 

inspired by the Occupy movements. They 

took place in the midst of the 2013 protests 

in Brazil, known as the June Journeys 3 . 

Red paint, intended to resemble blood, 

was meant to produce a physical sense of 

familiarity in humans for trees. I wondered 

then: must trees be seen as humans (or 

animals) in order to be protected? In this 

anthropocentric appeal, does nature need 

human activism to speak and act on its 

behalf, contesting the impositions of urban 

design? 

In the following months, these questions 

made me look all around the city for trees, 

plants and vegetation, sensitive to their 

presence and to their absence too. After a 

while, I began photographing these beings, 

particularly plants that sprout through cracks 

in sidewalks and concrete, plants that grow in 

the small corners of walls. Those who wander 

through a city with an inattentive gaze may 

not notice their presence on sidewalk edges, 

on top of roofs, in sewers or between tiles, 

but there they are. Sometimes weeds grow 

in the company of flowers. Some weeds 

may later become bushes or even trees, 

unarguably making their own composition of 

urban landscape. 

Weeds. In Spanish (malas yerbas) and 

Portuguese (ervas daninhas), they are 

considered bad and creators of damage. 

These plants reject the constraining designs 

of urban planning, which dictate whether 

existing forests, trees and plants may remain 

or must grow in places separated from built 

environments - sometimes even fenced off 

by humans. Weeds, either native or nonnative 

species, tend to make their presence 

rather ‘inappropriately’ in cities. Similar to 

Left | This aerial view dates back 

to 2013, before construction work 

began on the bypasses. 

Captured using Google Maps 


79




The two bypasses, and the Cocó Park today, 2018 

a squatter, they defy land use and ‘occupy’ 

cities, demonstrating not only the fertility 

of the land beneath, but also the vitality of 

plants. 

In this sense, plants that occupy cities can’t 

merely be called ‘weeds’. These spontaneous 

urban plants are instead more appropriately 

titled ocupadeiras. It is a Portuguese word 

I made up, combining the verb ocupar 

(occupy) and the noun trepadeiras (climbing 

plants, that lean on other plants and 

structures in order to grow). For a similar 

term in English, I first considered ‘occuplants.’ 

Then I thought perhaps ‘squatter’ plants 

would aggregate an explicit political 

dimension of spatial subversion to these 

urban creatures. 

Ocupadeiras make us believe there is 

a non-human way of activism, silently 

engaged by plants. This may be a proposal 

based in fiction, but they indeed occupy 

both the physical urban spaces and the 

imaginary human spaces of the mind. Cities 

can accommodate nature willingly or with 

obstinacy, in a relationship where nature’s 

agency is always looking for ways to burst 

into an urban landscape. As I became more 

aware of these plants, they engendered a 

political and poetic shift in my own ways 

of human activism: instead of focusing on 




reaction and deforestation, I shifted towards 

life that sprouts, vibrates, exists, resists. 

Open green spaces in cities, such as parks, 

vacant lots and community gardens have 

been the subject of many studies. Nature 

conveys feelings of safety, connection, 

pleasure and well-being, urging the 

emergence of biophilic design, as argued 

by Kellert, Heerwagen and Mador (2008). 

Svendsen (2009) understands that urban 

stewardship, the act of taking care of these 

spaces, is a means of improving the health 

and well-being of people. 

Weeds, on the other hand, tend to occupy, 

spread, commute and re-design urban 

landscapes laid waste by humans, taking over 

the concrete through its cracks. Perceived 

as signs of abandonment and urban decay, 

these plants are frequently cut and pulled 

out. They were not meant to be there, 

because they were not ‘designed to be’ there. 

But it seems that news did not reach all plant 

species. Ocupadeiras create a silent existence 

with the built physical structures of cities, 

particularly in warmer temperatures. 

photographs by friends as contributions 

to this visual archive. Publishing these 

photographs on Instagram with the hashtag 

#ocupadeiras automatically created a 

gallery. Exploring the social media platform 

Instagram, I came across several profiles 

and tags dedicated to sharing photographs 

of weeds, creating narratives of a natural 

world moving through the human design 

of urban landscapes. The tags #botanarchy 

[botanical anarchy], #NatureTakesOver and 

#CantStopNature, to name a few, are nodes 

of a larger web of perceptions that assemble 

and enmesh plants and humans, nature and 

the constructions of humans in cities all over 

the planet. In these photographs, weeds 

speak through their own existence. Although 

a common target of eradication by municipal 

departments, these plants overcome dire 

conditions, show resilience, and require few 

resources. 

Challenging human design, they present 

hybrid landscapes, criticizing – time and 

again – the ‘guards of the border’ of 

modernity (Silveira 2009), which separate 

and compartmentalize for the sake of ‘purity’ 

(Latour 1993). The weeds instead argue for 

their right and intent to have their place in 

urban space. 

I started photographing ‘ocupadeiras’ in the 

city of Fortaleza, Brazil, and also received 

João Miguel Diógenes de Araújo Lima, 2017 


81




Some of these photos, and their captions, 

create visual poems that pay homage to 

nature’s agency, such as the profile @ 

irrefreaveis (Portuguese for ‘unstoppable’), 

managed by Brazilian designer Paula Tabosa, 

with photographs mostly from the city of João 

Pessoa, Brazil. The profile @PlantsOfBabylon 

is maintained by Frenchman François 

Decobecq, known as Joas, who posts his own 

photographs of these ‘plants of Babylon’, and 

also reposts photographs by other users, 

tagged with #plantsofbabylon. Providing a 

more scientific take with plant identification, 

the profile @ConcreteBotany, based in 

Philadelphia, is managed by a team of plant 

‘spotters’ and an Entomology specialist. Each 

of these profiles and hashtags create their 

own galleries of photographs of weeds. 

This act of photographing and sharing 

photographs gradually turned into a research 

process for me. On Instagram, using a 

hashtag allows the creation of a gallery of 

shared photographs, making it easy to access 

all images published with that same tag. 

Hashtags also enable mapping other profiles 

and hashtags dedicated to weeds around 

the world, as well mutual recognition with 




them. I also came across projects with an 

online presence outside Instagram, such as 

Vida Baldia, a 2011 photographic initiative by 

Fortaleza-based biologist Pablo Pessoa, and 

Ervas sp by artist Laura Lydia, who created 

a set of artistic paintings and a map of plant 

identification of weeds in areas of the city of 

São Paulo, Brazil, in 2014. 

Weeds are apparently ephemeral on the 

surface and rather perennial underneath. 

Resurgent, consistently ‘annoying,’ their 

existence is extended through photographs. 

If a human is likely to approach a plant with 

the purpose of removing it, the photographer 

is a human who appreciates these forms 

of life, demonstrating a different attitude 

towards them, a different perception of 

urban space. Trying to combine the gallery 

of photographs and the archive of profiles, 

hashtags and projects, thus came into 

existence the Collaborative Museum of 

Ocupadeiras 4 . 

analyzed from within through the practice 

of curating, bringing together pieces and 

looking for connections between them, and 

trying to make sense of the world. 

Going through these photographs of weeds 

– considering both the collection I created 

and all the other collections – our aim is to 

re-think the relations between humans and 

non-humans in the daily design of urban 

landscapes. 

In pragmatic terms, maybe nature needs 

human activism to speak and act on its 

behalf, for instance, against real estate 

speculation. But humans, we need nature 

for our agency, and this acknowledgement 

has been made in recent years in several 

areas of expertise, particularly through the 

transdisciplinary approach of ecological 

criticism. In the field of urban design, this 

The notion of Museum is often that of 

a repository, a storage facility for old 

objects. But museums have become much 

more dynamic, ranging from cutting-edge 

interactive technology to social memory. On 

this, the wide reception of Graham Black’s 

critique (2005) on the need to transform 

museums for the 21st century as spaces 

of engagement with visitors, through 

interaction and new technologies, stands 

out. Furthermore, anthropologist Nicholas 

Thomas (2010) proposed to understand 

museums not as mere archives, but rather as 

a research method: a place where complex 

webs of meaning can be perceived and 



83



Ocupadeiras make us 

believe there is a nonhuman 

way of activism, 

silently engaged by 

plants. 




critique enables an attempt to understand 

and go beyond the worldview in which 

ocupadeiras are perceived as undesired 

urban creatures. As argued by Latour (1993), 

modernity has taught us to avoid whatever 

is messy. And weeds frequently expose 

messiness, growing through the cracks in the 

concrete as they like to do. 

The counter-design of weeds can be a 

reminder of life underground, and all around 

us. Timothy Morton (2017: 2), commenting on 

ecological criticism and the need to change 

our current images of nature, said that a 

new worldview “means dealing with how 

humans experience their place in the world. 

Aesthetics thus performs a crucial role, 

establishing ways of feeling and perceiving 

this place.” 

We hope, therefore, that our museum of 

ocupadeiras, and all the other galleries of 

weeds, may contribute to changing such 

images, instigating urban planners – and 

urban humans in general – to perceive and 

question their place in the world. 

Endnotes 

1 Earlier in 2013, the global wave of Occupy movements 

had taken an ecological turn with the demonstrations in 

Istanbul to protest an urban development plan backed 

by the government to cut down trees of the Gezi Park, 

replacing it with a shopping mall and a residential building. 

Similar issues usually ignited local demonstrations, such 

as the collective No a la tala de árboles (Spanish for ‘Don't 

cut down trees’), which held a symbolic funeral in 2016 in 

the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia, to protest the practice of 

cutting trees down for construction works and building 

reforms. 

Fortaleza, read: https://globalvoices.org/2013/09/01/ 

brazils-occupy-coco-park-fights-to-save-nature-reservefrom-construction/ 

3 For an overview of the protests in Brazil, read: https:// 

globalvoices.org/2013/06/17/video-vinegar-revolt-bus-fareprotests-spread-across-brazil/ 

4 https://cargocollective.com/joaomiguellima/Museu- 

Colaborativo-das-Collaborative-Museum-of-das- 

Ocupadeiras 

References 

Black, G. (2005) The Engaging Museum: Developing Museums 

for Visitor Involvement. Psychology Press. 

Kellert, S.R.; J.H. Heerwagen; M. Mador. (2008). Biophilic 

design: Theory, science, and practice. New York: Wiley. 

“Floods and The Chamizal Issue” National Park Service, 

February 24 2015, https://www.nps.gov/cham/learn/ 

historyculture/rio-grand-floods-and-the-chamizal-issue. 

htm, Accessed on May 13th 2018 

Morton, T. (2017). Ecology without Nature: Rethinking 

Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard University Press. 

Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Silveira, P. (2009). Híbridos na paisagem: uma etnografia 

de espaços de produção e de conservação. Ambiente & 

sociedade. Campinas, 12 (1), jan-jun, 83-98. Retrieved from 

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/asoc/v12n1/v12n1a07.pdf 

Spirn, A. W. (1996) Constructing nature: the legacy of Frederick 

Law Olmsted. William Cronon (Ed.). Uncommon ground: 

rethinking the human place in nature. New York; London, 

91-113. 

Svendsen, E. S. (2009) “Cultivating resilience: urban 

stewardship as a means to improving health and wellbeing”. 

Campbell, Lindsay; Wiesen, Anne (Eds.). Restorative 

commons: creating health and well-being through urban 

landscapes. Newtown Square, EUA: USDA Forest Service, 

59 – 85. 

Thoreau, H. D. (1862). “Walking”. The Atlantic Monthly, A 

Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics. Boston: Ticknor 

and Fields. 657-674, June. 

2 For details on the occupation movement, the political 

dispute and the Police intervention at the Cocó Park in 

Thomas, N. (2010). Commentary: The Museum as Method. 

Museum Anthropology, 33 (1), 6-10. 


85


All Indifferent Decay 


Left | Caroline Clerc 

All indifferent decay, 

inclination, 2017 

Archival inkjet print 

40 x 35 inches 

Caroline Clerc is a Los Angeles based artist 

working in photography. Her work posits 

landscapes as complex sites of recognition 

and cultural construction. She is faculty at the 

University of Southern California Roski School of 

Art and Design and her work has been exhibited 

in Los Angeles and nationally. Artist residencies 

include Obracadobra, Oaxaca, Mexico; Millay 

Colony for the Arts, New York; the Nordic Artists’ 

Centre Dale, Norway; ‘Nature, Art and Habitat’ 

Taleggio Valley, Italy; Taft-Nicholson Center 

for Environmental Studies, University of Utah, 

Montana; and Caetani Cultural Centre/Allan 

Brooks Nature Centre Artist Residency, Canada. 

www.carolineclerc.org 


87



All indifferent decay, contrasts images of 

sweeping vistas with interior imploded 

landscapes. 

This work does not offer a vantage point 

upon which to survey the landscape; multiple 

views of the mountains that circled the valley 

are collapsed into single images. 

These images mirrored my experiences 

navigating a secluded valley in Montana. 

Navigating unmarked forest interiors 

resulted in images that visually progress from 

restrained romanticism to increased chaos, 

and embody anxieties about the long-term 

stability of natural spaces. 

My work addresses landscape 

representation. 

The work problematizes the act of looking 

and disrupts the idea of understanding one’s 

relationship to the environment, or to nature. 

Initially, the scenes appear as static or 

tranquil, but they are not what they seem, 

and they are not what they should be. 





All indifferent decay, approach, 2017 

Archival inkjet print, 40 x 40 inches 


89



My work begins with the intention of 

taking a sustained walk within the natural 

environment, and I rely on maps to 

determine a potential route. 

Once the walk begins, planning ends, and 

there is only the experience of wandering, 

making images along the way. 

When I return to the studio, these images are 

composited via digital methodologies into a 

single photograph. 

In constructing the final photographs I seek 

to reference complex representational 

histories found in 19th century, within the 

traditions of landscape art painting and 

survey photography. 

I am interested in exploring the landscape 

as a complex site of recognition and cultural 

construction. 

I am interested in subverting order through 

wandering and reconfiguring, and to 

confound the traditional subject/object 

relationship by moving beyond a single 

viewpoint to present multiple perspectives. 





All indifferent decay, ebb, 2017 



91



In this work, looking, seeing, and 

understanding are not constants, indeed they 

are constantly shifting. 

The images are at once a place and no place. 





All indifferent decay, continuation, 2017 



93




Section 4: 

Regenesis 


R e g e n e s i s 2 0 1 3 


30” X 22” 

However, choosing to see a problem in an ecology, 

and acting with a map of its resolution may 

help the rest of us what to see, and then act. The 

following articles argue that better incarnations 

are not only possible, but do-able, not only for 

the problem at hand, but for the hidden within 

ourselves. 


95


Homes 

MJ Tyson 

Left | MJ Tyson 

Homes, 2017 

Installation view 

Following | MJ Tyson 

Homes, 2017 

Installation view 

MJ Tyson is an artist and teacher based in 

Hoboken, New Jersey. Tyson’s work is centered 

on the relationship between people and their 

possessions. Interests in value and material 

culture have led her to draw from the worlds 

of art appraisal and museum conservation. 

Her recent solo show at Brooklyn Metal Works, 

The Last Objects, focuses on destruction as a 

creative force and the transformation of personal 

objects. Tyson received her BFA from the Jewelry + 

Metalsmithing Department at Rhode Island School 

of Design in 2008 and returned to earn her MFA 

in 2017. She has been an artist in residence at the 

Studios at Mass MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, 

and the Wormfarm Institute. 

www.mjtyson.com 


97







99

Homes 

MJ Tyson 

All material carries a past, and whether we 

acknowledge this lineage or not, it exists. 

It may be to our advantage — as a way 

of orienting ourselves in our world — 

to consider the cycles of creation and 

destruction intrinsic to the objects and 

materials that surround us. 

Within the form of these vessels, the 

materials express and interact. They teach 

that there is no need to draw hard lines 

between categories or between objects. 

This series of vessels, Homes, explores the 

reincarnation of personal objects through 

material transformation. 

Right | MJ Tyson 

36 Orchard Hill Drive, 2017 

11" x 6" x 5" 

Personal objects left behind 

by the deceased residents of 

36 Orchard Hill Drive 


Homes 

MJ Tyson 

Issue N o 2 101

Homes 

MJ Tyson 


Homes 

MJ Tyson 

Homes are extensions of, and memorials to, 

the lives that brought them together. 

Each vessel is made from objects left behind 

by the deceased residents of one home, and 

is named for the address of that home. 

Now they're new objects, with evidence of 

multiple states. 

Suspended in decay and transition; in 

growth; in both. 

Left | MJ Tyson 

35 Norman Avenue, 2017 

13" x 6" x 5" 



35 Norman Avenue 


Homes 

MJ Tyson 

Each of these vessels is made from the 

personal objects in one home, 

left behind after the owner had died. Each is 

named for its address of origin. 

Each one is a place. Collectively, they’re a city, 

a community, 

living and dying just like those that brought 

them together. 

Right | MJ Tyson 

145 Delmage Road, 2017 

12.5" x 7" x 5" 



145 Delmage Road 


Homes 

MJ Tyson 


106 Mapping Meaning, the Journal 

When accessibility is 

thought of as only 

meeting the requirements 

of the Code, we are 

unnecessarily limiting 

our creative capacity.

Placing Inclusion 

Ahead 


Left | Ileana Rodríguez 

An accessible route provides a safe 

egress to anyone. It was decided this 

route would be used as the inclusive 

means of egress, besides providing the 

Code’s requisite stairs. The ramp quickly 

became a celebrated architectural 

element of the building. 

Ileana Rodríguez studied Architecture at Florida 

International University in Miami. She is a 

former swimmer with Team USA Paralympics 

who competed at the 2012 London Paralympic 

Games among other venues. Currently she is an 

accessibility specialist working with organizations, 

designers and architects to create inclusive spaces 

around the world. 







What if design was strong enough to awaken 

people’s awareness of others’ uniqueness, 

as well as how all are served by such a 

design? Too often, the product of design, 

constrained by time and attitude, sets 

bounds on what we - the users of the design 

product - can or cannot do. Just take a look 

at the images and sketches that accompany 

this essay. One of the scenarios shows the 

consequence of design, limited. The other 

shows design expanded to empower all users 

thereby celebrating the people and the place 

enveloped by it. 

Providing accessibility into, through, and 

from spaces is many times approached as 

a joyless chore rather than as an exciting 

design opportunity. 

The book of laws - the Code - is considered 

the limiter of creativity rather than the 

impetus/starter of it. The Code’s contents 

are seen only as a series of parameters that 

designers must follow. 

rigidly set designs, does not necessarily result 

in an accessible building. 

Besides, with such a narrow design 

viewpoint, what else could the consequent 

product be, but a weak effort that may not 

achieve its intended function of accessibility? 

Such an attitude leads to restrictive spaces 

that cannot enable good human interaction. 

When accessibility is thought of as only 

meeting the requirements of the Code, 

we are unnecessarily limiting our creative 

capacity. The Code does not demand 

forgetting about the design opportunities 

found in the diversity of the users, or of 

creating inclusive spaces. Rather, the Code 

should expect the creative soul that chooses 

to pursue design to see the rules as aids 

toward a successful, fully-functioning end 

product. The images that accompany this 

essay portray the impact of an accessible 

design effort that did not achieve accessibility 

versus one that is not only accessible but 

inclusive. 

By adding up, without much thought, a series 

of formulas, and then plunking them down as 

Inclusion is easy to accomplish if it is 

recognized as requisite to the design concept 

Left | Ileana Rodríguez 

This ramp’s design did not take all differentlyabled 

users into consideration. As a result, the 

ramp itself has obstacles and cannot serve its 

purpose of providing access. 




Above | An accessible route provides a safe egress to anyone. It was decided this route would be used as the inclusive means of 

egress, besides providing the Code’s requisite stairs. The ramp quickly became a celebrated architectural element of the building. 




and acknowledged throughout the entire 

project’s development and execution. What 

happens when we look at design through a 

lens having too narrow of a focus? Where 

we only yawn when we see, and then 

ploddingly follow, the rules and regulations 

for our building? The result is a lost design 

opportunity that serves, at best, a few 

people. It becomes a place where diversity is 

not found. 

level. Design can drive inclusion and change 

perceptions. I perceive inclusion as an 

attitude, a state of the mind that is made 

manifest only with the right effort of melding 

creativity with rules. Design, when looked at 

through the lens of inclusion, has the power 

to change the attitudes of people, from the 

individual level to the wider community. 

I urge you to put and hold in your minds the 

possibilities of what can be accomplished 

when design is the all-inclusive bridge that 

brings people and abilities to the same 




Sarawut Chutiwongpeti 

Left | Sarawut Chutiwongpeti 

The Dreams of a Greater Countries, 2016 

Color Photography on fine art paper 

134x112 (cm) 

Sarawut Chutiwongpeti has contributed to the 

development of the media arts through his artistic 

and research practices at noted international 

institutions in Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, 

Croatia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, 

Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Japan, 

Malaysia, Nepal, Norway, Russia, Singapore, 

Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sri 

Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, 

United Kingdom and United States of America. 

He graduated in 1996 from the Department of 

Fine and Applied Arts, Chulalongkorn University 

and Master of Arts in Fine Arts with Major Art 

in Public Spheres (MAPS), Lucerne University of 

Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland in 2016. 

Since 1999, he has been working as a full time 

contemporary artist. 

www.chutiwongpeti.info 




My artwork focuses on 

personal and larger 

issues of cultural 

transformation related to 

global mobility, and the 

precarious situation of 

the neo-nomadic artist. 




Sarawut Chutiwongpeti One to Another, Installation View, 2016 

My artwork focuses on personal and larger 

issues of cultural transformation related to 

global mobility, and the precarious situation 

of the neo-nomadic artist. 

I work in the realm of contemporary art and 

am interested in revealing the unexplored 

facets of experience. 

Living in Littau, yet often shopping in Emmen 

for the ingredients to prepare traditional 

Thai meals, I incorporate packaging in my 

installation. 

I am directing my energies toward the 

exploration of the phenomena of crossdisciplinary 

art and culture. 

They are mainly from food products that 

I have consumed over the past eighteen 

months since coming from Thailand to live in 

Lucerne. 

I am searching for answers that can help 

reverse the subordination and objective 

materialism that are prevalent in today’s 

society. 

What are the thoughts, doubts, fears, 

uncertainties, and reflections that we have 

and experience as we head toward the new 

material and immaterial territories, which we 




. 

Right | Sarawut Chutiwongpeti 


Performance, 2016 




are to inhabit in the future generations? 

Featuring logos, brand names, and sources 

of origin, the artwork represents and 

symbolizes how things and people come 

together from around the world to be 

recombined at one new location. 

The context and significance of the artwork 

is, first of all, highly personal, a means for 

me to make connections between my native 

country and background, and my present 

situation. 

The subject of the artwork, however, also 

touches upon more general issues related 




Right | Sarawut Chutiwongpeti, 


Installation View, 2016 




to contemporary global mobility, everyday 

aesthetics and routines, and is thereby 

significant in terms of cultural transformation 

and the challenges of living and surviving 

faced by a neo-nomadic artist. 

distribution of information and foster a 

profound universality in human nature and 

cross-cultural and critical collaboration. 

I am especially interested in finding out 

how contemporary art can enhance the 


Mapping Meaning, The Journal 

Conclusion 


Based on installation view, 2013 

Following | Anne Janine Lindberg 

Based on installation view, 2013 

Mapping is always first a journey into oneself, a 

place one may, or may not want to go. 

The exploration and consequent analysis require 

courage to attempt, and to continue struggling 

with, seemingly interminably. 

Once one’s walk with keen awareness has begun, 

other ways and paths present themselves. They 

cannot be left alone, unanswered. 

This issue is as much a presentation of others’ 

mappings, as it is a call for yours. 

Begin.

Mapping Meaning, the Journal (Issue No. 2)

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