Open Fields
Posted on May 30th, 2006 in activism, project news and
I’m working (slowly) with several collaborators (artists and non-artists) to develop the Open Fields Project, which is an interpretive investigation and documentation of urban ecologies in Philadelphia. These urban ecologies exist in countless diverse sites and scales across the city: in sidewalk cracks, decayed brick walls, backyards, vacant lots, long-forgotten junk heaps, expressway shoulders, railroad tracks, and post-industrial brownfields. Some of these sites are interstitial spaces, insinuating themselves in between the hardness of the city; others are much larger and constitute cohesive places with distinct identities that approximate rogue parks.
One thing many us working on the project have come to understand is that the more one observes and photographs these leftover spaces and their varied vegetation, the more one sees the quiet complexity of natural ecologies which happen to thrive in seemingly hostile urban environments. The process of close study allows one to pass through layers of perception and understanding: first scan reveals little more than the distinction between man-made and invasive weeds; second scan perhaps leads one to distinguish a prickly weed from a leafy weed; the third scan provides more detail and understanding of the subtleties nature achieves even in “limited” environments; and so on.
I believe we all also agree that it’s very important to this project that we are non-specialists embarking on a rather “scientific” course of botanical or ecological “study.” We hope to arrive at unconventional methods and systems of classification that maybe begin to challenge received notions of science and the scientific method. Specifically, I think of Thomas Kuhn’s work regarding paradigm shifts in discussing scientific revolutions: the idea that science becomes ensconced in normalized methods and worldviews of which anyone working within a specific paradigm is unaware and therefore unable to see beyond. I don’t mean to claim that our project is pushing us into a new paradigm! But the implications of engaging in a pseudo-scientific investigation, being non-scientists, are that we may work to expand a given paradigm and (who knows) find ourselves in uncharted territory.
What particularly interests me about these thriving urban ecologies we are discovering is how they relate inversely to the entropy of man-made urban environments. Walls crumble, sidewalks crack, buildings fall down–and in this loss, this slowing down of man’s progress, nature asserts itself with much resilience and vigilance. Mankind must work so hard to stay the onslaught of nature! Ours is a technological history; that is, a history of subjugating nature to our needs and desires. And I think for anyone who takes the millennial view, this is a reassuring comfort: that nature, in whatever unfathomable and infinite cycles, will always prevail, will always creep up through the cracks and gaps no matter how we trivial humans attempt to control it and ultimately destroy it. Nature is dead! Long live nature!
View some preliminary work on the Open Fields Project here.
