Summer
Show
2022
Show
2022
24
November
18:00 SAST
November
18:00 SAST
Ecological Devices
Uncovering the Contaminants Held in Black Bodies and Landscapes due to Extractive Activities of Mining in South Africa
Contaminant separation through pigment absorption experiment. Molaoa, M. Unit 18. 2021.
Mpho Molaoa
MArch 2021Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Naadira Patel
Unit Leader: Sarah de Villiers
Unit Assistant: Nothando Lunga
UNIT 18︎︎︎
Hyperreal Prototypes: Supersurfaces
Project Website
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“In writing the book, I took on two major problems with which I have, in good company, long grappled. The first was how to understand modern forms of dispossession, exploitation, repression, and their concrete impacts on the people most affected by them and on our shared conditions of living.”
- Avery F Gordon (2008)
- Avery F Gordon (2008)
Edendale’s lead mining past still haunts its surrounding social and ecological environment and surfaces; itself rendered detectable through spatial frames in the local water, soil, and air of the present-day adjacent township of Mamelodi. As a result, the work calls into question the manifestations of contamination, mutation, economic progress, and liability within the affected community of Mamelodi. Through the perspective of the interrelations of waste, economic production, ecology, and community, the work will both centrally reveal the contaminants absorbed by the varying bodies inhabiting this community, and propose an approach for remediation. This will be done through the lens of Anna Tsing’s work around ideas of assemblage (2021). In this work, assemblage is defined as a surface or space of the organic gathering of multispecies, whose diverse encounters produce a multilayered ecosystem.
The project will consist of a series of prototype devices that analyse the existing social and ecological hauntings through an allegorical science fiction. Prompted by anthropocentric spatial analysis, an art installation which intends to unearth and archive the connections between uneven geographies of social injustice and environmental degradation will be constructed (Tsing et al, 2021). Thus, revealing how black bodies buffer white bodies from the contaminants expelled from these geographies of extraction.
As the architect I am tasked with using foresight to narrate and mediate ecological responsibilities. Therefore, the MDP is intrigued by structures of power within mining which are simultaneously historic and contemporary, through revealing the erasure, alteration, and mutation of the ecological surface within the mining site of Edendale. This is done by scale changes, new adjacencies, and collections of ecological truths.
Keywords:
Ecological Trauma, Black Body, Contaminated Surface, Mutation, Cyborg, Planetary, Threshold, Scale
Ecological Trauma, Black Body, Contaminated Surface, Mutation, Cyborg, Planetary, Threshold, Scale
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