EMERGING TOPOGRAPHIES : TOXIC EARTH SCAPES

Abstract

Nothing is not zero and can still be counted as one. Dealing with the issue of a large tract of abandoned toxic land in Kukup- a blighted nothing, a need arises to remediate and rehabilitate the site, symptomatic of a greater issue in Southeast Asia’s shrimp farms. Fulfilling this criteria and also addressing economic concerns is the instatement of organic shrimp farms, as opposed to the unsustainable conventional methods of aquaculture which rids the earth of its ability to sustain life and thereby becoming toxic. The reclamation of the land thus renders significant that which was previously seen as unusable and to be discarded, elevating the soil to become increasingly valuable real estate. Upon this new usable ground, diverse groups of people can come to live and the process of which begins to define a new mode of rural-urban living that straddles the divide between the countryside and the city. Nothing has thus become a Tangible One. Establishing relationships between the toxicity of the soil, the amount of soil excavated due to this toxicity (subtractions), the shrimp farm, and the rammed earth plinths constructed from the excavated toxic soil (additions), a grid is derived from considering the elements of production and is imposed on the site within the limits of the former shrimp farm. The invisible site contours containing the boundaries of toxicity is mapped within this network of grids, informing the extent of plinths which rise from the ground seemingly like toxic barometers, each reflecting the degree of toxicity through their differing heights. Here, earth is elevated to become a marker of toxicity, where the land, often considered something to be occupied, becomes the occupying entity by populating the landscape in its own manner. Out of the nothing that the land seems to be, the toxic plinths emerge from the surrounding topography, creating in Kukup a new undulating earth scape on which human habitation takes root.