26 dirt

The architect's library: books, shelves, cases, collections, displays, exhibitions and READING.

on site DIRT 26 art architecture urbanism landscape

Joshua Craze : the garbage future of Juba

Chloé Roubert : the pigeons of St-Hubert

Joseph Heathcott : Dustbowl WPA camps

Kenneth Hayes : Be Not Afraid of Greatness

WAI Think Tank : the aesthetics of Dirt

Ksenia Kagner : desertification of the Aral Sea

$14 display until may 2012

ON SITE 26

DIRT

Dust Storm, Pearce Airport, Lethbridge. April 1942. Glenbow Museum Archives NA-2496-1

SOLID DIRT the adobe pyramid at Huaca Pucllana

adobe | peru by gerald forseth

reinforcement layers platforms mass simplicity

Huaca Pucllana, not far from Lima, is an extensive adobe complex. Its pyramid rises 22m in seven platforms, and is surrounded by a variety of courtyards with 3m high walls. This large ceremonial and administrative site was constructed around 200 AD by the Lima culture and was occupied by another pre-Incan culture, the Huari, around 600 AD. The Lima had readily available soil, straw, water and hot sun in this coastal region made lush by the Rimac River flowing towards the ocean from the high Andes. The river valley offered the perfect environment for settling and building, for domesticating animals, for developing superior grain-growing practices, for fishing in a most prolific part of the Pacific Ocean and for producing a sophisticated ceramic and weaving culture. The rulers of Huaca Pucllana grew powerful through expansion in trade and government, in religious ritual and ceremony, and in competitive games. Unusual for adobe construction, the pyramid and courtyard walls were constructed with courses of adobe units laid vertically, then topped with a thick horizontal layer of clay before adding the next vertical course. The finished pyramid was a solid mass of reinforced mud capable of being carved into; there are three known funerary sanctums for rulers and priests at Huaca Pucllana. After burial, entrances were sealed and concealed using the same material and construction method as the pyramid. The horizontal topping between vertical courses reinforces the structure. It holds the dead weight of the seven platforms, and keeps it all intact during the frequent earthquakes of the region. And of course the topping provided workers with a flat and safe construction site for laying the next courses. When archaeologists and anthropologists examined formerly untouched portions of the horizontal topping, they found signs of modelling activity in the form of imprints of workers’ hands and feet. n

Gerald Forseth

ON SITE 26: DIRT

Dirt. It is more than the neutral tray upon which we do our projects and live our lives. Dirt, as it emerges in this issue of On Site , has its own integrity, its own history, its own power. ‘Dirt is matter out of place’, that famous phrase of Mary Douglas, echoes through this issue. But often dirt is exactly ‘in place’. Ancient architecture is characterised by a deep relationship with the elements: earth, air, water and fire. Geothermal heat recovery from the earth, and its dark twin, geophysical extraction of oil from the earth – both remain in our future. Construction sites, those semi-permanent installations, places of great danger, are the ground plane of the cit; they question all sorts of notions of cleanliness and architectural propriety. And earth itself, made up of dirt: we walk it, we measure it, we move it around. It is our plasticine, rarely accorded much respect, more seen as an exploitable resource. Matter out of place? Weeds, say, or vigorous hybrids: the case for micro-zoning, or no zoning at all. Things that don’t fit an urban paradigm based on zoning are seen as transgressive, weed-like and as such are vulnerable to a good sanitising scrub. Often to our loss.

CONTENTS

the aesthetics of dirt Reza Aliabadi and Lailee Soleimani

4 6

the eroticism of sun and dirt the aesthetics of dirt: a manifesto dirty salt, dirty world the art of Katy Bentall at DOM, in Dobre, Poland a career of moving dirt around drowning in garbage in Juba, South Sudan World Cup Park, the landfill parks of South Korea the value of landfills as necessary open space the pigeons of St-Hubert, Montréal collecting air-born scraps

WAI Think Tank Enrique Enriquez Meaghan Thurston Barbara Cuerden

10 12 15

waste, garbage and landfill Joshua Craze Ina Kwon

22 26 30 52 54

Maya Pryzbylski Chloé Roubert Michael Blois

urban difficulties Liam Brown Tanya Southcott Matthew Neville John Szot dirt and health Greg Barton Joshua Craze Joseph Heathcott Arthur Allen

dispersing ashes in secular urban environments the lost houses of Yaletown the morphology of collective housing on the urban edge first dereliction, then occupation

62 70 73 76

34 37 40 46

interview with Kate Forde, curator of Dirt, the filthy reality of everyday life a visit to Dirt , at the Wellcome Collection, London WPA migrant camps: modernity against environmental disaster tuberculosis sanitoriums in the dust bowl

geological landscapes Stephanie White

the Whitemud Formation that fills our kitchens the Aral Sea finding 5000 year old ash layers beneath our feet soil horizons, a project at les Jardins de Métis, 2005 Sudbury: be not afraid of greatness earth and sky

45 48 58 60 66 69

Ksenia Kegner Gerald Forseth Infranet Lab Kenneth Hayes M Alexandrescu landscapes Lisa Hirmer Kenneth Hayes Don Gill

18 64 78

dirt piles the Weeping Garden, Sudbury Comrades, be happy in your work

working environments Gerald Forseth Michael Leeb Stephen Reither and Jayda Karsten

3 44 56

the pyramids of Huaca Pucllana the Medalta pottery factory, sinking back to the earth DIRTT, doing it right this time.

other matters calls for articles masthead

on site 27: rural urbanism, on site 28: sound who we all are

79 80

this page: Jame Mosque, Na’ein, Iran. Winter 2002 above: basement, winter praying room middle: opening through the minaret’s staircase below: dome’s calligraphy in the main praying hall opposite page: above:Timche Amin-o-Doleh, Kashan’s Bazar, Iran. Winter 2002 below: Jame Mosque, Ardestan, Iran.Winter 2004

sun | iran by reza aliabadi + lailee soleimani

LIFE ITSELF

The dust under every fool’s foot, Is a darling’s upturned hand and a sweetheart’s cheek; Every brick that tops an arch, Is the finger of a king or a royal head. — Omar Khayyam

When dirt becomes a building it becomes a body, one that develops complex needs. The monolithic architecture of ancient Iran does not survive without making love to the sun everyday. When dirt becomes a body it becomes a mysterious woman, one that ages, with a body of beauties yet imperfections. The sun marries her with a love so passionate that it never ends. He embraces her everyday, they never stop, never grow apart. When dirt becomes a woman it becomes a lover, one that waits every night for another lovemaking in the morning. The sun gently climbs her body and explores her every curve. When she is warm inside; he enters her deeply and dances inside of her. When dirt becomes a lover it becomes a pregnant woman, one that gives birth to shadows; they grow tall, shape a character, live for a day and return to the womb. The child is perfect, pure and precise for he is the result of a passionate intercourse. When dirt becomes pregnant it falls in love, one that never ends. The sun sleeps at nights, and she waits for another day when another child is born. n

Reza Aliabadi © atelier rzlbd

WAI Architecture Think Tank

Capital of Ego, Collage No. 1 Wall Stalker

WHAT ABOUT THE AESTHETICS OF DIRT? a manifesto for contemporary urban design As a dim light gradually brightens the pitch-black scenery, the silhouette of nineteen dancers is slowly revealed through a thick haze. Henryk Gorecki’s melancholic Symphony No. 3 (The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) moves heavily in the thin air; leaden movements of performers cross a velvet- cushioned stage that seems to sink deeper with each step. Spectators are soon absorbed by the metaphoric maze of this urban epic. Chinese choreographer Wang Yuanyuan’s dance piece was heavily influenced by a city striving under the effects of air pollution – it appeared as if the small particles of dust and sand that so commonly float through Beijing’s air had penetrated the acoustic walls of the Performing Arts Centre. The scene reveals a sharp vision of blurred environments. Haze is a contemporary dance performance about a contaminated environment. Haze is a subversive performance about Dirt.

art + dirt | film + dance by wai architecture think tank | natalie frankowski + cruz garcía

haze tarkovsky pol lution stalker narrative

WAI Architecture Think Tank

The Last Glimpse, Collage No. 4 Wall Stalker

Art as deus ex machina Unfolding in three parts, Haze displays the bodies of the dancers in a continuous struggle with the pollution of the contemporary city. In the performance the urban tale is narrated with a strong visual mise en scène that reflects our own behaviour within a hostile environment – the dancers embrace a series of attitudes that include mirroring, judging and persecuting each other. Portrayed through a blurred atmosphere, Haze is a perfect illustration of the potential of dirt to inspire art, and the potential of art to address an unpolished version of reality. When art is inspired by the neglected features of our surroundings, a new dialectic relationship can be established with our urban context. Following a similar strategy, Andrei Tarkovski’s 1979 film Stalker exploits a smudged environment and makes it into the visual catalyst of the whole plot. In Stalker , dirt acquires a transcendental role as the plot reveals the journey of three characters that are in search of a mystical zone, and will go from a grimy village to a contaminated landscape of abandoned buildings and polluted ruins of old factories. While the bodies of the personages are constantly dipped into stagnant water, sunk into mud, buried into the soil where syringes, bottles and every kind of dirt lie, the real pollution is converted alchemically into strikingly beautiful imagery.

Has art managed to address a topic so long ignored by the discipline responsible for thinking, understanding and designing cities? Can urbanism learn from other forms of art and deal with the issues it usually ignores? What if, for once, dirt and other neglected, inherent areas of our urban domain stopped being a matter of repulsion and instead were transformed into the source of our inspiration? What if we were able to reconsider the aesthetics of the urban imperfections? Why, if dirt is usually in the city, it appears as if doesn’t belong to it? Why, if art can address the problems of the urban environment, has urbanism distanced itself from them? Why is dirt never diagrammed, mentioned, analysed? Why do renderings always show clear blue skies and immaculate streets? What about the potential of the aesthetics of dirt?

WAI Architecture Think Tank

Les Portes du désert, Collage No. 5 Wall Stalker

The modernist case Ever since modernism (although justified) became infatuated by hyper- hygienic urbanism, dirt has turned into a topic of taboo in the urban sphere. The modernists got rid of dirt from their diagrams, but dirt didn’t disappear from the city. Why then, if the city has proved to be more than the four Le Corbusian values of urbanism ( habiter, travailler, circuler et cultiver le corps et l’esprit ), has dirt remained an elusive topic? Why have the only brushes with the topic of dirt come in very sporadic proposals, such as the diagram by the Team 10 in the fifties ( Bidonville Grid , 1953), or the project by Koolhaas in the seventies ( Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture , 1972)? Why is it easier to flirt with floating cities, and gravity-less architecture, than to face dirt? Has our cleanliness become a Potemkinesque illusion of an unfathomable obsession?

WAI Architecture Think Tank

The Meeting II, Collage No. 9 Wall Stalker

A call for narratives As a strategy to address neglected topics on urbanism, we have been working on a series of architectural narratives. The creation of these urban episodes allows us to discuss topics that are usually left out of any discussion. The first of the narrative series titled Wall Stalker uses Andrei Tarkovski’s film as inspiration and as a theoretical framework; the main protagonists and the film’s inherently grimy environment become part of our reflection on urbanism. The images of Wall Stalker show the journey of a three-man exodus out of a failed city in search of a mystical wall where they hope to find the essence of architecture. The animation contrasts the visually puzzling effect of urban abandonment with that of the ultimate form of hygienic architecture: a colourless, featureless wall. This monumentally silent element enhances the presence of all the neglected parts of the city from where the three characters came from. Like Haze , and Stalker , Wall Stalker activates urbanism’s inner convictions, making dirt a part of the aesthetic canon of the discipline responsible for thinking of our urban environment. To achieve this, images of desolation, neglect, dust and haze have to become part of our visual repertoire, both as provocations and as rhetorical pieces of intellectual dialogue. We must not strive to glorify or work to achieve dirt, but we should include it as a potential tour-de-force . Dirt must be part of urbanism’s lexicon; it must be discussed, analysed and represented. As with Wall Stalker , we propose a subversion of dirt and all that it represents. To achieve change, to make urbanism relevant again, we propose to make it part of our representations and the aim of our efforts.

We call for a manifesto of Dirt.

Anouk Sugar

material culture | resources by enrique enriquez

IMPERFECT

fashion impurities perfection

nature change

You are the salt of the earth.

—Jesus to his disciples (Matthew 5:13)

reads ‘ and Morton’s Salt pours for the same reason, it’s all salt, perfect cube crystals ’. This sentence cannot better express the (already in agony) modernist ideology. The achievement of a supposed ‘perfection’ by standardisation, reaching for universal properties was Le Corbusier’s mantra:‘all men have the same functions and the same needs’. It is not by chance that Corbu chose the colour white as his signature. After thousands of years of struggle to make salt white and even grain, affluent people will now pay more for salts that are odd shapes and colors. Gray salts, black salts, salts with any visible impurities are sought out and marked for their colors, even though the tint usually means the presence of dirt. Many consumers distrust modern factory salt.They would rather have a little mud that iodine, magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate, or other additives, some of which are merely imagined. But modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt.Then, too, many people do not like Morton’s idea of making all salt the same. Uniformity was a remarkable innovation in its day, but it was so successful that today consumers seem to be excited by any salt that is different.. 2 We are seeking more and more the organic characteristics of irregularity, unpredictability, messiness, variation, or what I like to call imperfections . I love imperfections; they have distinctive, beautiful qualities that help us to better notice the real . I am not an optimist about trends, but I truly desire this time that the new perfection is the imperfect. The problem with Fordism is that we erased those characteristics that distinguished us as being human. The acceptance of an imperfect world would perhaps lead to a better one, or at least a different approach; and dear God we are desperate for such a change. Salt, a material that has shaped the world; a small reflection of our present times; and maybe, if we look closely, a diminutive crystal ball that will predict our future: dirtier? messier? Perhaps; but for sure, less white. n

With materials we create products and they, in turn, are producers of things. Some materials better represent human history than others, or at least have a better spotlight: coal, wood, water and – of course – the U2 of all materials, oil. What about the small rock that is salt ? My interest in this tiny material dates from living in Canada. Years ago, I was visiting the Musée des Civilizations in Quebec City when I was surprised to learn that Canadians are one of the highest salt consumers, however a large percentage of that salt is only used on roads to melt the snow.Anyone who lives in a winter urbanscape knows the David versus Goliath cleaning battle against salt brought into the house on your boots. Since then, every time I put salt in my salsas I see it differently. Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history. 1 Last year, designing a garden proposal with my colleagues, Urban B’s, for the International Festival Jardins de Métis/Redford Gardens and wanting to emulate the image of the winter garden during summer with a white natural material, salt came to mind. I started to investigate and discovered a whole not-so-small world. Towns, cities, empires, wars and even countries have been built around salt, a cultural engine of great power.. In my mother’s kitchen we had uniform odourless all-white salt. Today in my own kitchen I have six different kinds of salt with distinctive shapes, sizes, colours, scents and flavours: table or common salt, rosemary Canadian rock salt, aromatic sea salt with fresh organic herbs, black salt from Hawaii, salt for grilling meat bought in Portugal and Williams-Sonoma chilli-lime rub with sea salt. Definitely my world of salt has changed. The value of salt is a question of supply, demand and labour, but also of culture, history and fashion. A 1919 advertisement

Thilo Folkerts

Urban B’s. Fleur de Sel. Les Jardins Metis / Redford Garden International competition choice. 2011 opposite: Preparative collage for Fleur de Sel, the salt garden this page: Fleur de Sel after a very rainy season and two big storms. Environmental conditions made it less designed, less pretty– stronger, more mature.The form had taken its own charm. It is… dirtier, with soil, branches and leaves; a lot of traces. The ones that love it most are the small children. They believe it is the neige and play with the salt as if it is snow, trying to make a snow ball. Adults didn’t liked it for exactly the same reasons. I heard one woman say: Oh my god the snow! I can not stand it! A friend once told me: for you Enrique, snow and the cold weather are exotic, but for me, having been here for 35 years, it is just enough! Je ne suis pas capable! I always ask myself why, here in contemporary Canada, we built not with the weather but for the weather. Now I understand.

Marco Asciutti

1, 2 Kurlansky, Mark. Salt, a world History. Vintage Canada, 2002 p 445

Urban B’s: Marco Asciutti, Farzaneh Bahrami, Enrique Enriquez and Matteo Muggianu.

Enrique Enriquez

Meaghan Thurston

subjectivity memory power of place identity experience

DOM the place-based interventions of Katy Bentall

material culture dobre , poland by meaghan thurston

The first photograph I take of the house is of my reflection in the window. I am on the outside looking in. The window pane is absolutely filthy; spider webs smear the glass.

I arrived in the small Polish village of Dobre in June of 2010 with the artist Katy Bentall and her teenage daughter. We were there to visit the house DOM, Bentall’s art project in place-making. Dom in modern Slavic means home , a cognate of the Latin, domus . Pani Chopek had lived in the small house until age and illness demanded she move to the city with her children. After Bentall bought the Chopek house, which borders her own home in the village, she documented in watercolour its contents, then she began to engage in ‘interventions’ or acts of private performativity, rearranging the objects found in the house and writing on the walls.

Camera in hand I unbolt the door and step inside. Boards creak and sink under foot.The smell of decay fills my nostrils. For decades a Polish woman and her husband lived in this home, cooking, washing, and bathing; writing and reading the letters left behind, meticulously winding balls of string. Cloth bundles are arranged on one of the beds. It is as though the resident has gone out for groceries and may return at any moment to be surprised by a foreigner poking about in her humble home.

I was investigating the concept of home , following the lead of artists such as Gordon Matta-Clarke, Catherine Bertola, Rachael Whiteread and Louise Bourgeois. However, I felt disconnected from the very subject of my research. How was I to write of the contemporary artistic (re)imaginings of home and its emotive associations, from the library? Katy Bentall is interested in experience, with the self in space and with the space of the woman artist. My thesis supervisor was interested in ‘the capture of the experience.’ So it was that I arrived at DOM pulled in these different directions which, however, converged on this dirty, dusty old house. It was the meeting place.

I make a frame with the lens around a tin wash-basin, scarred with rust spots. A bar of soap, etched by fingernails, is in its holder to the side of the basin. Three empty tubes of artists’ paints lie in the basin. They are out-of-place. In an adjacent room, discarded clothing, furniture and papers hang about. From the ceiling a ‘meadow’ of old straw falls loosely to the floor.

Meaghan Thurston

There is a disturbing strangeness about an unfamiliar place. In order to comfortably inhabit a place which is saturated with the aura of other persons, a visitor may attempt to create a sense of place by rearranging things. ‘It is striking that when we arrive in a new place to stay for even a short visit’, writes place-scholar Edward Casey, ‘we tend without any premeditation to establish a group of fledgling habits such as putting the drip grind coffee in a particular spot, our laundry in another [...] These are habituating actions: they help us to get, and stay, oriented’. 1 One of my first questions to Katy Bentall was about the dirtiness of the place. ‘How can you work in DOM? It is filthy, and the air is mouldy.’ For Bentall, dirt and stain are pivotal to her art making: ‘This is a statement on femininity. Accepting the unacceptable – accepting the feminine – my art is an acceptance of the stain – it’s in me’. Does the detritus of our life hold a truth? ‘My interventions are very light’ she explained. ‘It’s easy to wipe me away as an artist. I’m not blowing things up. I’m like a spider, weaving a web.’ Bentall is engaged in a practice with little precedent in the commercial art world. Hers are not interventions arranged by the curator or the museum and she does not exhibit her work in a gallery. To experience Bentall’s work at DOM, or anywhere else, one needs to be explicitly invited to do so. Attuned to the specificities of the place in which she is working, her place-based art practice happens within the frame of the site.

There is a large armchair in DOM of stained and faded blue fabric. Behind it bright sunlight streams through a window. A spider web floats in the air between a bed board and the windowsill; a small pile of sawdust has accumulated around the chair’s legs, the work of the termites (something which at the time I took this photograph I did not notice). This chair waits, arms open, to embrace the sitter after a long day of work.

My role as the photographer of DOM, the place and DOM, the art project made me think about the ways that art can communicate the fragile, idealised bond that human beings have to place . The photographic image causes the viewer pause by igniting a memory, or by providing a window into a past with which we have no direct experience; however, when we take a photograph, transforming lived place into an image, what becomes of the experiential value of place? Yi-Fu Tuan’s metaphor,‘place is a pause in movement’ may provide an answer. ‘The pause makes it possible for a locality to become the centre of felt value’. 2 The camera shutter is a pause in movement too, and Bentall’s work reveals that the location of meaning and memory is not static, but is enlivened by the accidental stains and traces of the bodies it has enfolded. How DOM appeared when I left has already been altered, remade, re-imagined or forgotten, as it is in all places that never stop changing. n

1 Casey, Edward. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. p151 2 Tuan,Yi-Fu, Space and Place:The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. p138

Meaghan Thurston

Involvement with the ‘higher’ levels of culture is comparatively optional – but no one can escape the conditions of creaturality, of eating and drinking and domestic life… — Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked

The creaturality garden project wonders about the muffled histories and stories passed over and lying underfoot, beneath and between the paved-over landscapes of public spaces. ‘We have always been here’, says an Anishinabeg woman as she introduced a song at a drumming circle. Traces of the people shows another history of indwelling 9-15,000 years before we newcomers arrived to start telling quite a different tale. I am using my recently completed Master’s thesis, Art, Nature and the Virtual Environment, as pulp material for compost in a garden/installation project in the backyard of the Gardener House Studios at Britannia Bay beach in Ottawa. I have an itinerant residency there this summer and am blogging about it at creaturality.wordpress.com . In a raised bed planter built out of discarded books and filled with dirt, I am growing a Haudenosaunee or Iroquois three sisters companion planting: corn, beans and squash, to de- colonise the site by bringing back traditional food growing to a typically landscaped beachside park, beside a river previously navigated by a mostly exterminated aboriginal culture.

DIRT BANK the creaturality garden project

places traces use value gardens

collections plants , books and dirt by barbara cuerden

Barbara Cuerden

Besides my thesis I wonder what else might be buried at the bottom of the garden? Some online digging reveals to me that ‘ the history of the Ottawa River watershed is inseparable from the history of the Algonquin Nation’ – except that in fact it has been separated from it. Chasing words and the empty spaces between them, (and remembering the Britannia of Rule Britannia ) I find out that the history of the anishinabeg and other local indigenous peoples is not the kind of knowledge made available for surface consultation by a visiting public. The archives box at Britannia Bay reads as point form history beginning with ‘Capt. John Lebreton (vet. of the War of 1812) acquired landgrant’ [sic].What is left out between the lines of historical text are the extant land claims and treaty agreements collectively ‘overlooked’ by government officers and paper mill barons such as Philemon Wright. These waterways were colonised in the service of pulp and paper industries. In multiple ways the ‘base’ material of aboriginal indwelling was disappeared . Like so many other species of things, it has been written out, but perhaps leaving traces behind for newer ‘tracts’.

Outside the closed narratives and beyond the frame of the books used to build the planter, I read with Norman Bryson in Looking at the Overlooked – a book I frequently open to pages about ‘rhopography’, which he distinguishes from ‘megalography’: Megalography is the depiction of those things in the world which are great – the legends of the gods, the battles of heroes, the crises of history. Rhopography (from rhopos , trivial objects, small wares, trifles) is the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that ‘importance’ overlooks … The concept of importance can arise only by separating itself from what it declares as trivial and insignificant;‘importance’ generates ‘waste’, what is sometimes preterite, that which is excluded or passed over. 1 As I try to write this piece while most of the household is out of the house, I break to mop the floors of dirt tracked in by kids and dogs, noticing the traces and the ability of dirt to be imprinted on, in and through.

Barbara Cuerden

Dirt Bank, 1990. Dirt samples collected by travelling friends and acquaintances, with their stories about the dirt transcribed (some are below) and hung in file folders from the medicine cabinet towel bar.

The creaturality project tracks my ongoing 20-year accumulation of debris and ideas related to domestic concerns about dirt, my dirt collection stories-about-dirt, food procuration from dirt, cooking, serving and eating, and the kinds of attention that circulate through these processes. Much is discarded after being used up in other ways. What is surplus? What is loss? What is waste? Can what is leftover still be used as compost for the future? On the backs of shopping lists and other scraps torn up from re-cycled computer paper imprinted on the face side with proposals for under-funded art projects, I draw up itineraries and to-do lists that might recompose my domestic world into art. I keep scraps of ideas travelling in the linted pockets of my housecoat. Dirt spills over, floats around and sometimes settles, creating conditions for another kind of pedogenesis. n

1 Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four essays on still life painting . London: Reaktion Books, 1990. p61

Barbara Cuerden

Apron catches the overlooked, 2010

Lisa Hirmer

DIRT PILES collected thoughts on the landscape of construction

landscape | displacement by lisa hirmer

ground earth-moving plants instability surplus

For some time now I have been photographing dirt piles – the sizable mounds of earth, stone, torn apart trees, old and new vegetation, lost bricks and bits of asphalt that are informally piled up next to almost every construction site over a certain size. Once I began to look for them, it became apparent that large dirt piles are a rather common presence in the contemporary landscape. Any time I drive through a suburban, or semi-urban area, which is to say any place where the built is claiming new land, dirt piles appear in abundance. It is easy to predict where big, spectacular dirt piles will show up. They are the result of site grading – a process of adjusting topography to suit new plans. As earth is reshaped, extra material is piled up and left somewhere out of the way until a use for it is found or it is moved somewhere else, perhaps dissipating from consciousness but not from physical presence. This means they are almost certain around any project that requires substantial site grading to ensure even, opportune sites with good water drainage – big box stores, industrial parks and new subdivisions are prime habitats for a good dirt pile. I photograph the dirt piles because they, like most landscapes, are complicated. The etymology of the word landscape comes from the concept of a defined administrative unit of land, indicating that landscape is a combination of physical matter and how we understand that matter. The word was introduced into modern

English usage with the Dutch landscape painting tradition, again an indication that it is not just the terrain of the world but rather that terrain as well as the frame placed around it . The photograph, like the landscape, walks the line between matter and idea. It is both document and creation – it records the material realm and transcends it simultaneously. With a photograph the messy intricacy and banality of the dirt piles can be documented and layered against the creative faculty of an image. Photographing the dirt piles is, then, a way to study them. Dirt piles are often large, sometimes looming. Some are short- lived, only present during part of the construction process; others seem to be more enduring, lingering in fields behind completed projects, seemingly temporary even after years of being there as though awaiting an inevitable expansion of the built worlds they sit beside. The dirt piles are both relics of the landscape that used to be and measures of the forces of technology, industry and economy that make the large-scale reshaping of terrain possible. The dirt pile points both to what once was and the act that changed it. They are littered with evidence of former landscapes, fragments that suggest what might have happened on the site at earlier times, occasionally even hinting at possible narratives. Across them run tire tracks imprinted with fresh additions and backhoe gouges where material has been reclaimed – traces of recent but unseen human activity, suggesting other, more contemporary stories.

Lisa Hirmer

The dirt pile can be understood as a reciprocal form of what we build, a strange inverted reflection. It is a visible sign of a construction strategy that sculpts sites to easily accept generic buildings and their sprawling parking lots. The dirt pile makes these possible. Dirt piles are informal monuments to consumer demands that make such places profitable to build. There is a fickleness to the surface of the earth. It is something that is infinitely malleable, something that can be opened up, turned inside out, piled up. In a traditional landscape, one can imagine that dirt lies beneath the occupiable surfaces of the world, that it is the beginning of a terra firma – a solid earth. But here, in the contemporary world, the ground plane is not a stable reference point. We cannot assume that it is firm or permanent. Most places can be modified to accommodate any kind of building and any conception of what the landscape could be. When this happens, dirt piles are what is left over – matter that has been moved out of place and left to sit, silently alluding to that which is unneeded and not particularly valued. The dirt pile is a de-formed landscaped, a landscape that has been taken apart and reassembled into a heap. A sense of disorientation, even an ungroundedness, surrounds it.

And yet, a dirt pile roots itself rather quickly. As soon as the dirt is left, nature takes advantage of the open soil and things begin to grow. The torn-up landscape stitches itself back together, turning into something newly, if strangely, whole. And as it grows, the distinction between the worlds of humanity and nature dissolve. The natural, as a temporal measure of what came before human activity, is dislodged. Here the natural and artificial have been torn up and piled on top of each other, sometime repeatedly, till one is no longer sure where one ends and the other begins. They become the same thing. Many dirt piles start to become quiet little wildernesses growing generally unnoticed – certainly not charming or epic wildernesses, but messy, weedy complexities, perhaps even ugly. But, then again, growing dirt piles can also look beautiful, especially when they interrupt big box parking lots and monotonous industrial parks. They are massive undulating shapes and tangled complicated textures of old and new, natural and unnatural, constructed, artificial and undeterminable. n

Lisa Hirmer

2 Finding Juba’s Public Health Office is a challenge. After the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in 2005, ending twenty years of civil war, Juba was made the administrative capital of South Sudan, and the new government needed a home. It displaced the state government and moved into its buildings, creating a domino effect as homeless bureaucrats occupied the offices of others lower down the scale.The Public Health Office for Juba ended up in a small room at the back of the local police force compound. The police station is packed with indolent figures, slumped against walls. Hundreds of soldiers live outside in impromptu tents and makeshift shelters – they are here to ensure the referendum for independence passes without incident. A glorious ficus, its tangled trunk a mess of separate coils, has been transformed into a Christmas tree; hanging from its branches are gifts: the clothes, smoked fish and mosquito nets of the army that won independence from the north. At the back of the compound, Kallsto Tombe Jubek, the beleaguered head of Public Health for Juba, is sitting in a sparse office.There are no files in the room, but along the front of his desk, arranged like a small Hadrian’s Wall, is a set of cans and bottles: instant coffee and beans, guarded by a miniature Sudanese flag. During the civil war, Juba was a small merchant trading town. Encircled by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the town was held by the northern government. It was difficult to get supplies, and residents still talk darkly of those difficult days spent searching for food. There was no problem with rubbish during the war, Jubek explains. People burnt their rubbish. In villages up and down Sudan, I have seen the same practice. Old food, clay and animals hides are taken out to the edge of a village and burned; the ashes can later be used to fertilise fields. Fire in the village can be productive; in central Sudan, back in March, the evening sky was aglow, as villagers set the land aflame to revitalise the soil. After 2005, everything changed. Juba was rapidly filled with NGOs, hotels and the UN. With them came thousands of expatriate workers, plastic bags, promises of development and a quantity of rubbish Juba had never had to deal with before. Whereas the rubbish in the village is generally organic, in Juba today it is plastic and chemical: burning it does not renew the soil, it destroys the land. In 2006, with USAID money, the local administration finally established a rubbish dump.The going has not been smooth. It initially offered contracts to rubbish collection companies, but, Jubek told me, many of the companies just went around Juba, promising waste disposal services and collecting money from hotels and businesses, before promptly vanishing. Now there are three companies working in Juba, but they cannot cope with the demand.A company called South Sudan express services central Juba. Just taking the rubbish from one of the larger hotels, Jubek tells me, can occupy one of their vehicles for the entire day. South Sudan Express only has eight vehicles.

urbanism | south sudan by joshua craze BURNING THE FUTURE

rubbish recycl ing land appropriation dislocation industrial waste

the disposing of waste that cannot be disposed

1 The fires start at dusk. From the edges of dirt roads a hazy smoke rises up and hangs over the town, suspended in the dusty air. Leaves, batteries and plastics bags combine in the smouldering fires that cover Juba – Africa’s newest capital – with smoke every evening. By morning the fires have subsided, and, walking through the streets, you can find hardened fragments of cauterised plastic beneath the ashes; ruins of the future. In The Road to San Giovanni , the Italian writer Italo Calvino imagines a series of cities – mirror images of Italy’s own proud industrial centres – that generate rubbish cities, doppelgangers of their own excess.The more productive the cities become, the more they threaten to drown under the growing piles of rubbish that surround them.‘ This ’, he writes of Leonia, his fantasy city, ‘ is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday’s sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and all of its days and years and decades ’. Calvino paints a picture of a society that welcomes each day as if it were the first, and yet is choked by its own unacknowledged history. In Juba, it is not the past that is suffocating us, but the future. The endless burning plastic that fills Juba’s streets, unknown six years ago, is an anticipation of Juba tomorrow.

Giulio Petrocco

3 We are heading out of Juba on a bumpy road, and David, the Kenyan driver I have hired for the day, is complaining.‘The rubbish here is terrible. In Kenya, we recycle.You should go to Kenya, Joshua, and see how we deal with this problem.’ Scopas Lukudu, the Public Health Inspector for Juba Payam, is offended and I find myself temporarily the unwilling adjudicator in a competition between Kenya and Sudan.Thankfully, the argument soon stops, as Lukudu, heavy and saturnine in the back seat, concedes,‘one day we will have recycling. We have heard how you can make money from this thing’. We drive pass a market, with piles of okra on display next to plastic bottles full of oil. In reality, recycling is already happening in Juba. Young boys, thin and playful, wander the streets collecting empty water bottles; twenty-four such bottles can be sold at the market for one Sudanese Pound (30 cents), and will be used to store cooking oil. This is clearly not the sort of recycling Lukudu was referring to, as he continues telling me about his ambitious plans for the future: three more rubbish dumps, a sewage treatment plant… it is just a question of getting the money. Scopas Lukudu was Juba’s health inspector in the 1970s.When the war broke out, he joined the World Health Organisation, then after 2005, slotted seamlessly back into his old job. Thirty years of working for NGOs had marked Lukudu, and, like many in South Sudan’s nascent government, he spoke in the strange language of bureaucratese endemic among aid workers. I thought as we left Juba town that this language of technocratic intervention, the lingua franca of government in so many parts of Africa, will be the NGOs’ most enduring contribution to the continent. As we drive further along the road to Yei, we pass under the shadow of Jebel, the mountain that marks the boundary of Juba. Buildings are less and less frequent, and soon the squatter settlements begin. In 2009, 30,000 people were evicted from Juba town. Two years later, much of the land the squatters were forced from remains fenced off and empty, sold to investors uncertain about South Sudan’s long term political stability but greedy enough to buy up the land in case there is a future profit to be made. Many squatters simply moved slightly further out of Juba, to the sides of the Yei road.We pass their ad hoc assemblages of UNHCR canvas and cardboard boxes which, in their austerity, have the look of Potemkin villages: recently built for the visitors’ benefit. According to the 2008 Land Act, it is the communities of South Sudan who own the land.What this means in practice is obscure.The ministry that gives out land permits in Juba has refused new applications for a year now. Still, amid rumours of speculation and corrupt community elders taking payments from large companies, houses continue to be built in Juba. Many of the squatter settlements outside of Juba are populated by members of the very community that should own the Juba area. Squatters’ huts are arranged on one side of the road. On the other side, a long line of garbage fires greets us like a crowd before a procession.‘Companies are always cutting corners’, Lukudu complains, gesturing at the rubbish; rather than taking it all the way to the dump, they drop it off at the side of the road, just before the checkpoint at which licensed companies have to pay 5 Sudanese pounds to use the dump; unlicensed companies pay 15.

Just past the squatter settlements are the first signs of the new United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) complex – indications of a new, more permanent status for the mission. For the first six years of peace, UNMIS rented a large site near the airport, but now the owners want their land back. Here in the shadow of Jebel Mountain, a lone Rwandan soldier stands guard over an empty valley.‘That’, Lukudu tells me,‘was the old rubbish dump’. We slow as we approach the military checkpoint just before the dump. I see trucks being checked, and anticipate a long wait. Thankfully, Lukudu is waved through and we drive on past the huts and the squatter settlements, into the bush. It is the height of the dry season, and the ground is cracked, dotted with sparse bushes struggling under a strong sun that crushes colour into the valley floor. In the rainy season when the dust and the rubbish turn into a toxic slick that renders the roads impassable, the grass here, says Lukudu, is taller than a man is high. The only adornment on the arid landscape are large signs, every fifty metres or so, demarcating plots.This place, I realise, is going to be the site of frenetic development. In 2005, the South Sudanese government took over the offices of the state government. Now they are moving on. All the signs indicate land acquired for the future buildings of different ministries. One sign is for the Land Commission: the printed words loom large, standing over an empty landscape. Just as the signs finish, the rubbish begins. Rather than the small piles of burning garbage I saw earlier, now there are huge mounds of smoking rubbish, burning slowly in the noonday heat. All this momentarily confuses me: I understand the need to burn rubbish in the town, but why burn it here, in the arid emptiness of this landscape? I find my answer amid the smouldering trash – neatly arranged piles of scrap metal, delicate constructions as intricate as Jenga towers.They burn the rubbish, Lukudu tells me, interrupting my thoughts, to retrieve the metal, which they sell to Ugandan merchants who take it to Kampala to be recycled.

Giulio Petrocco

After another twenty kilometres, we arrive at the turn for the rubbish dump. Stretched out across the road, barring our path, is a thin strip of paper, knotted together with plastic. It is, like the thousands of roadblocks that adorn the dirt tracks of Sudan, less an actual physical barrier (scissors, freedom), than it is an indication of the real barrier: the people who put the barrier in place. Lukudu looks visibly surprised. Suddenly showing more energy that I previously thought him capable of, he announces that he is going to investigate, and hops out of the car, ducks nimbly under the barrier and saunters off down the road, gesturing at me to remain in the car. I wait for five minutes before becoming suspicious. In Juba, I heard stories of hundreds of people living at the dump; villagers displaced by land speculation, living off the scraps and detritus of the city. Perhaps the barrier is a sham, I think, paranoid by now, and Lukudu is using this time to ensure the dump is empty. Just behind the car, there is a group of people arrayed around the tree that marks the turn off to the dump. I walk over to talk to them.They come here everyday, they tell me, to sift through the refuse, and pick out food, bits of machinery and scrap metal. Yesterday, however, soldiers came and put up the barrier. Apparently a brigadier has claimed that he owns the site, and has forbidden rubbish dumping. The villagers I spoke to sat almost totally still: first the dump took their fields away, and then the dump itself, their livelihood, was declared off-limits.

It begins to seem strange that the proposed ministry buildings were so close to the rubbish dump; occupying the rubbish dump, I thought, would be a good piece of realty speculation by a canny brigadier. After talking to the group I set off for the dump. I want to find Lukudu and ask him about what I had just been told. It is hard to see through the dust and smoke, and the flies descend, congregating for an important conference on my mouth, coating my eyes; my skin feels alive. After walking for ten minutes, I give up trying to brush the flies off my face, and light a cigarette, the dull blue wisps of smoke standing out in the noonday heat against the diffuse grey of the smouldering plastic. After a few more minutes, Lukudu appears around a bend, walking towards me.The barrier, he tells me, was built by the local community, who are angry about all the rubbish being dumped on their land. And it is the government, Lukudu sighed, who is going to have to pay for all of this. In the heat and stench of the dump, I think about how different Lukudu’s explanation was to that given by the rubbish-pickers by the tree. It is only on the morrow that I come to wonder how Lukudu could have found this out, when he also told me he had not met anyone on his walk. Brigadier is a strange synonym for community. Together, we walk on to the dump.There are burning slag heaps lining the road, and the burnished metal edges of tin cans protrude from the carbonised remnants of a hotel’s daily effluence. The trees are twisted, flecked with ash.

Giulio Petrocco

5 The office of South Sudan Express is a hive of activity. Two of their eight vehicles are being repaired, and workers in orange jump suits are preparing for their morning rounds. Reception is a narrow cubicle on the side of the road, and I talk to Cheng, a Dinka from Bor, who is running the front desk. ‘We have a lot of problems’, he tells me.‘So many complaints: people tell us that we don’t pick up their rubbish in time, or we don’t pick up enough of it.’ He smiles as he is passed two pieces of grubby handwritten paper – ‘You see? More complaints’. Giulio Petrocco, the Italian photographer whose images you see around these words, and I ride with the South Sudan Express workers in their truck.We sit in the back, on top of the rubbish, as we wind our way slowly through the streets. Some markets have collectively organised their rubbish collection and pile it on the side of the road for the workers to collect, without gloves or removal equipment save a plastic tarpaulin and a rake. Shop owners, angry that their rubbish sits and festers by the side of the road, berate the company as we go through Juba.The workers, who are all Sudanese, direct complaints to their overseer, a snappily dressed Dinka man who wrote a Masters thesis on hospital waste management. He listens studiously, noting everything down. Others, unable to pay the high prices of South Sudan Express, are unconcerned and pile up their rubbish in old oil drums to be burned come sunset. Finally, after what seems like hours, we head up the Yei road.The truck is rented from an Eritrean company, and our driver is also Eritrean; part of a vast force of East Africans who provide most of the labour in Africa’s newest state. We pass the government dump, which two weeks after I visited it is still closed, and head another forty kilometres up the road. This dump we finally arrive at is not new – a broken South Sudan Express truck testifies to its long use. Like the other government dump, there were the same smouldering fires, the same smell of an industrial plant.The only difference was the people: hundreds of them, waiting for the arrival of the truck, and then, as it gradually tipped up, scattering the waste on the ground, they poured over it, finding aubergines, needles, pineapples; searching bottles for water and alcohol; taking note of the position of scrap metal. As I walk through the dump the people mill around me. One man, a high school graduate, asks me: ‘Give me something, anything, it is not right that I have to live here’. He had returned from an internally displaced people’s camp to find his village transformed; a harbinger of the city that Juba is becoming. ‘Please’, he said,‘give me something’. And I gave him a cigarette. n

You can read the modern history of Juba in the rubbish; a future spied, not in tea leaves, but in whiskey bottles, in piles of horns and hides that did not find their way to the factory, and in USAID rice sacks that we trample underfoot, ripped and discarded. There are shacks lining the side of the road. Not quite dwellings; bare skeletons of sticks, wreathed in simple skins of tattered blue plastic. In this barren landscape, we finally meet someone. A man walks towards us, wearing a tattered blue shirt. He carries a machete, and accompanies us to the dump. His village, he tells us, is but three kilometres from here. During the war he was displaced to a camp and then worked in Khartoum. After 2005, he returned home only to find that it had become a rubbish dump. Rather than return to farming sorghum, he farms the rubbish, planting seeds of fire and harvesting the scrap metal. When we finally arrive at the dump, it is little more than a continuation of the road – a shallow pit, barely two metres deep and largely indistinguishable from the area surrounding it. It doesn’t smell like the rubbish dumps I have visited elsewhere in Africa.There is nothing rotting, nothing foetid: here, everything burns. It smells like an industrial plant and is the uniform grey of Soviet architecture in Warsaw. I find a scrap of colour: some Japanese toothpaste, crushed into the earth, staining the ash red. ‘These companies’, Lukudu complains, referring to the waste disposal trucks,‘have no training, no instruction, they don’t know what a rubbish dump is’. We walk back to the car; he tells me that if there wasn’t a barrier up on the road and the dump was functioning, there would be 500 people here, going through the new rubbish. Back at the car, I see a rubbish truck roar past us. Now the dump is closed where will they dump their rubbish? ‘Oh’, Lukudu replies,‘just further up the Yei road’. ‘And what’, I ask,‘will happen when the rubbish reaches Yei?’ Lukudu looks concerned, as if he suspects I might be slightly soft in the head.‘Don’t worry’, he tells me,‘Yei is very far away’. 4 After I got back to Juba, I phoned the Kenyan man who had rented me one of his cars. We chatted amiably about the difficulty of doing business in Sudan, and the great opportunities to be found here. Finally, he asked me where I had been. ‘Oh’, I replied,‘I went to the rubbish dump’. ‘Which one?’ he asked me.

‘Which one? The dump on the Yei road.’ ‘Yes’, he said,‘of course, but which one?’

I hesitated.‘The dump next to the UN compound’, I said, in a tone that sat somewhere between statement and question. This made him confused. ‘Why’, he asked,‘didn’t you visit the big dump? You are writer; you should see these things. If you talk to the Ministry of Public Health in Juba, I am sure you can arrange a visit.’

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