It finds itself in a moment where not only its guests struggle to find a sense of place, but it too struggles to hold on to one. It has an opportunity that is hard come by today – to re-survey, rediscover and remake a place. Our trip lasted a few weeks, and when we returned home we printed 300 photos from the kite camera. Flipping through all those aerial shots, I started to see a landscape very different from the rigid lines of the grid. The camera had been tossed around in the wind, capturing disorienting images at random. There was no horizon, no sense of scale – only texture, colour and motion. You can get lost in this landscape. The photos reveal something else too – something about us. Our little blue tent, which looked so surreal against the open grass, was pitched next to a tree – next to a patch of trees growing in mowed grass. We hadn’t made it to the middle of all that space with nothing around us but sky and grass. We’d held fast to the familiar and hovered at the edge of all that emptiness. The park management had been right. The park does need something to mediate between guests and the place. The question isn’t whether to intervene, but how . How can they make lines that move, paths that change, boundaries that breathe? What are the tools of their survey? I don’t have an answer. But I have a compass. And I think that’s where I’d start.
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Lightning Field, which uses marking as a tool in a similar way to shape an individual’s experience, reading and reception of landscape. The stainless steel rods provide a marker in the landscape, a reference, that has no impact on the function of the site, and yet completely transforms a visitor’s reading and evaluation of the site,
Unlike the tree in the grassland that offered orientation and comfort, the experience within the field is quite disorienting despite the rigid regularity of the poles. Similar to Lindsey’s motivations, people come to the Lightning Field to get lost, and yet the most worn path traces the perimeter of the site, circumscribing the grid of poles and maintaining a navigable position at the edge. This goes back to the park management’s need to superimpose a system of trails, and mode of entry into the place. Our attraction to this
Lindsey Nette
1 John Palliser was an Irish geographer that led a western Canadian expedition for the British Government in 1857. Palliser’s Triangle is the region roughly outlined by his route. 2 Palliser, John. The Papers of the Palliser Expedition, 1857-1860 , edited by Irene M. Spry, Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1968. 3 Manning, Richard. Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.
not to mention one’s awareness of oneself
within the site. Di Maria explicitly dictated that the experience should be an individual one, defining the ratio of people to space by limiting the number of visitors.
romantic idea of the flat, empty landscape seems to contradict our trained spatial recognition that looks for order and reference.
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