shane neill
The history and transformation of the site, rich with layers of past and present life, is immediately evident if one cuts into the ground. The section’s physiography reveals the life that gave form to the material: shards of colourful floor tiles, hand-made bricks stamped Hecho en Mexico , scraps of twisted nineteenth-century wrought iron rebar, held in a congealed framework of once fluid molten slag. Even more striking are the colours that manifest the chemical life of the slag. For nearly a century burnt orange (arsenic), yellow (cadmium), cyan (copper), teal (chromium), sea foam (iron), grey (lead) and maroon (selenium) leached into the ground and the Rio Grande. 5 Our subjectivities are shaped and reshaped by the ways in which we are simultaneously connected to – and separated from – the landscapes we occupy. Rancière’s notion of aesthetics as the ‘distribution of the sensible’ 6 offers architects an understanding of remediation not as the restoration of an abstract environmental order, but as the re-distribution of diverse orders that offer new connections to landscapes. From these connections, is there potential to create new subjectivities? Too frequently, as is the case with Martha Schwartz’s McLeod Tailings project in Geraldton, Ontario, remediated land formations are merely passing spectacles for speeding motorists. 7 An unoccupied landscape cannot engage – never mind redistribute – our sense of that landscape. Peter Latz’s reoccupation of the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord provocatively engages the memory of the visitors. Though he is able to critically occupy the landscape, whimsical programs such as the adaptation
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5 Malcolm Pirnie Inc. p2 6 Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics , trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004 7 For a critique of relational aesthetics, see Carol Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110, Fall, 2004. pp 51-79
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