Environments by Design

Abstract

This presentation will address a shift from the urban to the geo-urban in order to examine materials and circulation as means for reorienting the hinterlands in relation to transnational and industrial production. In particular, it will look at histories of energy transition and environmental transformation in the Southeastern United States. Further, it will discuss how meaning and symbolic value are understood vis-à-vis the geology of the fall line, containment of the Savannah River Site, and speculative future of the tin-spodumene belt of the Carolinas. To do so, it will theorize the line and mine, alongside notions of personal typology, in ways that reference a multitude of theoretical and lived crises across vastly differing bodies. Likewise, it will explore a new poetics for capturing spatio, enviro, and social phenomena intersecting with politics, the violence of fossil fuels, biomass, lithium, and nuclear power. Through an immersion in the multi-faceted experience of ports, at once periphery-core metabolisms, sites of extraction, and mechanisms of tension, this presentation will question the global-to-the-planetary in terms of logistical and infrastructural narratives expanding upon Lefebvre’s “right to the city”. Its research will share objects, fieldwork, public art and community strategy in conjunction with civic dialog as an urgent backdrop against which stories of transition are framed, often for the purpose of challenging accepted notions of culture, place, and authority.