Material Reconstructions
Vasundhra Aggarwal
2024 Spring Residency
Welcome to the tea party. The research work is displayed and performed as a tablescape and communal gathering to reimagine material economies and labor practices as sacred ceremonies and rituals. The images, texts, materials, and artifacts selected are a curation of radical speculations that shift the way we think about and create with Land. Guest participants are served mugwort tea, smoked oysters, and nut brittle to recreate the sensory experience and rich material landscape of Governors Island. You are invited to touch, to read, and to interact.
Aggarwal shares reflections from designing community workshops for surveying, visualizing, and making processes with natural materials on Governors Island. She collaborated with the island’s existing landworkers and environmental organizations to learn from their caretaking and placemaking practices. Her studies investigate the possibility of creating new building materials from local and unwanted sources that can remediate contaminated soil conditions. The work is a personal exploration to create a communal process.
The act of reconstructing—that is, to repair and to restore—aims to dismantle Land from its colonial histories and ecological negligence. It calls for participants and viewers to speculate the decommodification of Land and the integration of its maintenance into material design. The project reframes and rebuilds the relationship with Land from that of ownership to stewardship in hopes of creating a climate-resilient future.
Aggarwal shares reflections from designing community workshops for surveying, visualizing, and making processes with natural materials on Governors Island. She collaborated with the island’s existing landworkers and environmental organizations to learn from their caretaking and placemaking practices. Her studies investigate the possibility of creating new building materials from local and unwanted sources that can remediate contaminated soil conditions. The work is a personal exploration to create a communal process.
The act of reconstructing—that is, to repair and to restore—aims to dismantle Land from its colonial histories and ecological negligence. It calls for participants and viewers to speculate the decommodification of Land and the integration of its maintenance into material design. The project reframes and rebuilds the relationship with Land from that of ownership to stewardship in hopes of creating a climate-resilient future.
People
