Replenishing the Aquifer
Material: Text, chalk, collage, hand drawing, modelling, installation, poetry
Throughout history, civilisations have worked with our environment to move and store water in times of excess and deficit. These water infrastructures took the form of the Subak in Indonesia and the Stepwells in India whose purposes serve not only the functional, but the spiritual and social aspects of life.
Can we reposition water infrastructure to be not subliminal, but central to our social/cultural spaces and public consciousness?
Can we learn from artists like Mary Miss how to engage the public in decoding our surrounding environment? Can we design a water infrastructure that is contextual to a site’s history and ecology? Can we bring human bodies more intimately in contact with the poetics of water and geology?
The aquifer is under strain. With increasing development and housing targets in and around the South Downs, the aquifer is under pressure of over-abstraction. With an eroding coastline and climate migration on the horizon, the South Downs must conceive of a new system of water infrastructure to protect and replenish its existing processes.
Underfunding and neglect of infrastructure is prevalent in the UK and beyond. How can we leverage the poetics of water, geology and movement to reimagine water systems and spaces? How can we reposition these systems as part of a material cultural identity?
What is Infrastructure?
What is the distinction between the infrastructure that is seen and used by people directly/explicitly vs the infrastructure which works as subliminal systems? What does it mean to be seen/unseen? What is the significance of form if it isn’t seen by many people? Or does it feature explicitly in the views and experiences of the landscape? Do people have faith/trust in infrastructure that looks/appears a certain way? Or perhaps with AI we are more accepting of functioning systems which are not visually/physically legible/explicit to us?
What would a subtle infrastructure be? What would a social and contextual infrastructure be?