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
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