"The Creeping Amalgam" explores the trace of elemental mercury and its multi-scalar relations through metabolic thinking putting in question and addressing how environmental information through pollution can develop spatial intersections to build a cultural memory and national narratives.
The incorporation of metabolic thinking into architectural discourse to generate critical spatial interventions that address how we are forced to live with refuse. It also explores the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics to observe landscapes transformations.
By tracing a specific substances that result from industrial and cyclical processes, the project investigates ways in which “re-wilding” the nature and ourselves is explored and how transmutation between territories, humans and nature gives the opportunity of transformation.

Boundaries between environment and architecture disappear turning architectural construction into an imaginary yet reconstructive landscape in which different iterations give rise to community memory where a sense of identity is perpetuated. The proposal explores the role of environmental preservation throughout the symbiotic analysis that exists between the relationship of natural landscapes and collective memory.

Cultural landscapes are multidimensional constructions, a result of determined historic frameworks, a scenario of social life where interactions of biotic and abiotic elements coexist as a long-term socio-natural construct. Different colors, shapes and scales of inflatable cocoon sculptures will provide an adaptive habitat alongside natural site conditions were the implementation of bioremediation for mercury is meant to happen in every pond. Their unfolded materiality, seek for the translation of embodied seeing instead of an opticality, aiming for the presence and the physical study of the new species growing in the ponds. Their material structure acts as a signifier inciting meaning and interconnection with their unique context which can’t be separated from the visual, it is unified with a full range of somatic responses.

The project was developed at the Royal College of Art.

KOOZ What prompted the project?

CL The first intention of the project was to trace a specific substance that result from industrial and cyclical processes and to understand it’s metabolic pathway, it’s unique problematic, it’s multi-scalar relations and how does this substance intertwine with different agents that are at stake creating a spatial intervention. It becomes an excuse to question how we are forced to live with refuse being exposed to segregation, polluted environments and nature extractivism among social structures and processes.

The site specific intervention is located inside the Peruvian Amazon in a place called La Pampa inside the Madre de Dios region which has been exploited since colonial times by artisanal gold scale mining activity. Therefore, inside this activity, the use of elemental mercury is carried out to form an amalgam which facilitates the extraction of gold creating topographical formations which become filled with pollution and consequently creates human and environmental degradation.

Amazonian societies are today socially and culturally homogeneous, archaeologists and anthropologists have been working in the cultural ecology traditions, the social and cultural discontinuity between pre- Columbian and contemporary Amazonian societies, and the immigration as an indicator of historical change. So, ultimately, the exploitation of mercury and gold represents a cultural and social difference between the ones who physically exploit it and the ones who rejoice in the outcome through soberanity and environmental racism at the expense of human and nature exploitation. Transmutation between territories, humans and nature provides an opportunity for a transformation.

KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?

CL A personal interest to establish cultural integration and build group identity through generational curses and to ultimately, ensure species survival led to research questions such as how can landscapes develop spatial intersections to build a cultural memory and national narratives rise, also how do the multiple readings of landscapes are influenced by collective memory identity in constant transition? And, how do collective and individual memories facilitate the perception of past and future landscape experiences nowadays through a more ecological approach? Questioning ourselves what things should we do to enhance this bond, or what should we usurp became relevant aspects to consider.

Depending on which interest is used, symbolic and cultural production – whether in cultural landscapes, cultural histories, or the reconstruction of collective memory – can also be a resource for the ruling classes to distinguish themselves and transmit distorted information such as politics. Today, however, a bioregionalism focus is what many scholars and new generations aim to understand the force that local ecology presence can give to stop community conflicts. So, the project intervention tackles a bond and link between everyday life activities, landscapes, and cultural memories, attributing an evident linkage feeling of the past to today’s roots. The reproduction and allusion of cultural memory is a site-specific notion that gives rise to community.

KOOZ How does the project approach the contemporary Anthropocene epoch?

CL Within a constant desire to dominate and control nature above all-natural forces, the creation of perspective distortion has led to people be, and later on feel, alienated from nature itself.

The inhuman time humankind is facing has become a crucial aspect to revalue our relationship with the environment. Our era has been hauntingly disturbed through colonialism, imperialism and, capitalism and in the landscape is where we find the perpetuated deterioration of these events. Consequently, the impact of the relation between HUL (historic urban landscapes) and the feeling of being part of something becomes relevant where a sense of respect sprouts. In this intervention, this feeling cannot be carried out without taking into consideration the sensibility with activities, the physical aspect of it, and sometimes, with symbols creating an attachment with a landscape.

As we become more aware, natural landscapes obtain value. This is merely granted by a human subjective conception of space and wellbeing. Whilst individual and collective sentimentalism matters reside, the quality of life the land has given to humans becomes conditioned by themselves and creating a distortion in cultural memory; so the projects position us by questioning who are we to determine or qualify landscapes uniquely by what can we obtain from them? Thus this ideology comes from a consumer conception, a counterpart manifests: we can qualify land by how much, environmentally sustainable, it has given us by its unique characteristics.

An underlying ideology has emerged from this disjunctive, the term ecopsychology has evolved as humankind has regressed; it’s merely the relationship humans expect to obtain with natural habitats to gain a balance within a constant transformative world, nonetheless, it is a contradiction the fact that humans try to harvest industrial culture by consumerism and environmental racism, among others, through nature alienation and at the same time trying to be as close as possible to nature and nurture from it. By aiming to integrate nature with social and cultural values, we become attached to a conceived urban heritage.

The intervention seeks for the unique cosmovision of different cultures acquire a special meaning which somehow, has been forgotten among some; to give the right for communities and society to prevail ancestral territories within a legal framework for future generations to ultimately build their own perceptibility of collectiveness.

The Anthropocene era is violent and has a controlling role in shaping our circumstances, so the intention resides in giving nature and natural landscapes a real voice which some cultures still, transcendentally have.

KOOZ What is for you the potential of architecture as an agent for change?

CL For me, it is traduced as a contemporary transmutation of what the land or landscapes can offer as an ecology agent. Thus all these nature understandings have been in human essence since humanity first started, an unclarity and exuberant yet faded human position towards ecologies has driven us to a distortion of longing. At last, if humans care, they will conserve, and those who don’t know, won’t understand.

Architecture has had the ability to evoke past characteristics into present ones becoming an influential role as a unique device in humankind’s lives, it becomes a vehicle to preserve and protect the change of policies in contemporary lives.

In my personal opinion, we need to understand basic ecologies of one’s natural surroundings; on being a part of the natural and cultural communities and processes in which one lives, a greater and common understanding will prevail. Because it involves direct personal interest, it is attached to individual memory of it, experience and the manipulation of architecture. And then, a collective one. When ingrained into a place, we recognize it, and therefore, it recognizes us back; in this way, a sense of mutual preservation is conceived.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imagination?

CL By experiencing the natural and non-natural world, a symbiotic relation manifests in our sensorial memory each time we delve into it. This manifestation of activity is nurtured by our senses. Our perceptions become memories of not only the activity itself but also of the space, which, intrinsically, both become condemned to our mind-senses relation. These natural, sensorial, vivid activities within architecture and non-architecture spaces and places are symbolically preserved in our remembrances. The place itself becomes a container of experience.

Literature has helped creating awakening towards the representation of architecture by taking us to those specific and unknown places. Such evokeness has gained differentiation among sites and minds tied to memories and storytelling, this leads to how architecture was firstly and often remembered with stories and beliefs which then were represented through writings, then illustrated in drawings and paintings, onto nowadays photography and video. Furthermore, it is this timeless perpetuity to preserve these places and landscapes to cherish and sustain human memories.

Bio

Cristina is a Mexican-Spanish multidisciplinary designer. She has concluded her studies in Mexico City, Florence, Barcelona, Canada and her MA degree in London. Her background includes published works from the re-production of Sol LeWitt’s wall paintings both public and private at OMR gallery in Mexico City and PACE Gallery NYC to her own paintings and architecture exhibitions showed in several galleries such as “aquiencorresponda” – at HarvardGSD, Lagalá and Artifice, as well as diplomas in History of Art from Sotheby’s and HarvardGSD. Cristina believes in the cultivation of empathy with our environment, our way of living and our historical and cultural background within a rapidly changing world.