Echo Archive: Gowanus Lab
Martha Steele
2025 Fall Residency
ABOUT THE PROJECT
This installation synthesizes an iteration of Steele’s ongoing research project, Echo Archive, focusing on Brooklyn’s notorious Gowanus Canal. Echo Archive is a digital archive investigating the legacy of toxic industrial waterfronts across borders and their lasting ecological impacts. Sifting through this research reveals the reverberations of the queer labour/life embedded within these sites, human and non-human. These histories are often intangible as a result of their strategic exclusion. Responding to this void, Steele’s research methodologies look to the echoes and impressions left by these lives to assemble an image of them. Throughout this project, Steele has engaged various research mediums, including down-scan sonar imaging, UV-water testing, and hydrophone recordings to both visualize and amplify invisible structures of the Gowanus. This installation presents a fictional lab containing both empirical findings and speculative imaginations. An ‘exquisite corpse’ composed of both hard and soft data, Echo Archive: Gowanus Lab blurs the lines between truth and science-fiction to create a space of possibility.
COLLABORATORS/SUPPORT
The Gowanus Dredgers, The Billion Oyster Project
People
