M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

and violence; keeping urban reality at bay. They are often
recreations of the exclusive farmhouses, mansions and
apartment blocks of the super rich in California,
complete with private swimming pools and health clubs,
walled-in security and 24-hour electrical power backup.
The names of these fortified communities reinforce the
perception of the American global village and search for
socio-spatial community — the ideal community that
Americans have sought since the landing of the Pilgrims.
(Marx, 1964) The phenomenon of walled cities and
gated communities is a dramatic manifestation of a new
fortress mentality. The gated communities phenomenon
has enormous policy consequences. It allows some
citizens to secede from public contact, excluding others
from sharing in their economic and social privilege. This
result raises an ideological question that prompts
polarized viewpoints. Are gated communities a metaphor
of the exclusionary fortress, creating walls between
citizens, or are they refuges from the forces that threaten
family, economic security, and quality of life? (Blakely &
Snyder, 1997) Gated and walled cities are hardly new
ideas. In England the earliest gated communities were
built by the occupying Romans around 300 B.C. and
walled and gated military settlements were built in the so
called New World, with the earliest being the Spanish
fort towns in the Caribbean. But not until the latter half
of the nineteenth century did the first purely residential
gated neighbourhoods appear.
The Super Kingdom structures reference the “offworlds”,
the “Architecture of Fear” (as Tunde Agbola
describes fortified lifestyles in Lagos), and the architecture
of dictator’s palaces. Taking an inspirational cue from the
image of the vulture in the beech tree, we developed the
key characteristics of three palaces: Mussolini’s Palazzo
della Civiltà Italiana which has become known as the
Colosseo Quadrato, Rome; Stalin’s Palace of Science and
Culture, Warsaw; Ceausescu’s The People's House
("Casa Poporului") in Bucharest, now the Palace of the
Parliament. For the adaptation of the Mussolini design we
adopted the building strategy of a small-brained animal
builder, which has a limited repertoire of behaviours and
is stereotyped and relatively invariant. (Hansell, 2007)
Through this iterative way of building, small-brained
animals in nature can build amazingly complex structures.
The pragmatics surrounding the mounting of the Palace
of Science and Culture in a beech tree dictated that we
worked with cylindrical forms rather than box elements
and for this reason our reference changed to the Palace
of the Soviets, a design for a building in homage to Lenin
in Moscow that was never constructed. Aware that
buzzards were reported to be over-wintering in Kent, we
inverted the building so that it could be conceived as a
rather ostentatious perch for a raptor. Keeping the
defining characteristics of windows and balconies, the
Palace of the Parliament was constructed from a series of
‘cogs’ wrapped around the tree, offering multiple floors
of potential animal residence. As a way of signaling the
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presence of the buildings to winter foragers, the internal
spaces were filled with food in the late autumn of 2008,
and there is some evidence that the structures have
been used as winter feeding stations.
Throughout 2009, using the animal ‘show
homes’ as film-set, a narrative is being developed through
video, animation and with a sound score by composer
Dugal McKinnon. This extension of the site-specific
installation through audio, video and animation functions
as an exploded document that incorporates fictional
elements. Corresponding with concern about human
transit and settlement within the region the proposed
narrative will serve as a metaphor for the transience of
nature and culture, the ultimate non-locality of things and
the shifting negotiation between human and non-human
that make places what they are.
References
Zimmer, C., 2009. As Climate Warms, Species May Need to Migrate or Perish.
Yale Environment 360. [on line] 20 Apr 2009: Report Available from:
http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2142 [cited 19 May 2009]
Davis, M., 2006. Planet Of Slums. London: Verso
Kent, L., and Drew, S., eds, 2005. KING’S WOOD: A CONTEXT. Challock: Stour
Valley Arts
Marx, L., 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America. New York: Oxford University Press
Blakely, E., J., and Snyder, M., G., 1999. Fortress America: Gated Communities In
The United States. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press
Hansell, M., 2007. Built by Animals: The natural history of animal architecture.
New York: Oxford University Press
London Fieldworks was formed in 2000 by artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson as
an umbrella organisation for creative research and collaboration at the art, science
and technology intersection. Typically, their projects engage with the notion of
ecology as a complex inter-working of social, natural, and technological worlds.
For more information please visit www.londonfieldworks.com