kudzu Kudzu is a soft building material introduced to hold ground in place. It moved through nurseries, crates, railroads, ports, and construction sites, installed as erosion control, repair, and cover. A supposed agent of stability, kudzu grows by accumulation; it drapes itself over slopes, porches, embankments and buildings, binding soil with massive tuberous roots. What was planted as surface grew out of its frame. Federal programs accelerated its spread: kudzu was laid down to calm dust, to seal disturbed ground, to repair landscapes made fragile by construction. It appeared first at world fairs, then along highways and embankments, then folded into farms and infrastructure as fodder for livestock. A material meant to fix ground refused to stay fixed. In Canada, kudzu is regulated before it can take root. Classified as a prohibited noxious weed, it is governed before it can become landscape. water Water binds human and other-than-human worlds, pasts and futures. Granite continents occupy only twenty-nine percent of the Earth’s surface; the remainder is basalt, covered by a medium that sustains life while eroding all other rock. Water is an ecological archive, water can speak and warn, evoke pain and joy. For Joanne Barker water is intimate, remembering what has passed through it —‘Confluence knows that reactions matter and are on the move, changing the earth as they go’. 13 Every contact leaves residue. Water reminds us to attend to the margins and the suppressed histories of land. Efforts to straighten the course of the Mississippi to accommodate settlement are periodically undone. ‘Occasionally the river floods these places. Flood is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be’. 14 Water reminds us to keep looking around the edges. aquarium The aquarium is a glassed-in sea. In marine systems, freshwater is stripped of dissolved solids and recomposed with measured salts to achieve controlled ionic balance. Nineteenth century aquaria were fragile constructions shaped by imperial science and a fascination with the undersea. When aquariums are decommissioned, some bodies leave the tank. Fish poured into rivers, plants tipped into storm drains. In its afterlives, rich aquarium water becomes matter out of place, ghost residents in the residue.
U.S Department of Agriculture, Public Domain
Zen Sutherland
from the top: Kudzu as a beneficial agricultural import. Kudzu as an uncontrollable force; kudzu behind earthfare, Taken on August 5, 2010 below left: H Moll, A New Map of the World, showing the course of Mr Dampiers Voyage Round it : from 1679 to 1691. All the world was accessible; all the world could be brought home. below right: ‘Aquarium with Whales, etc.’ unknown author, 1873
13 Joanne Barker, ‘Confluence: Water as an Analytic of Indigenous Feminisms’. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 43, 2019 14 Toni Morrison, ‘The Site of Memory’, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir , R. Baker et al., eds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998
Nick Buchanan
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on site review 48 :: building materials
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