Migratory Ruins: Artifacts for Ecological Restoration

Migratory Ruins: Artifacts for Ecological Restoration

2023

Collaboration with: Lorenzo Graham, Daniela Duarte and Laura García.

Within the limits of the Guajira Desert, multiple artifacts are situated to supply and operate within the Musichi mangrove throughout its reactivation process. The overlap of landscape layers and technology produces artifacts and hyper- artifacts: ‘artifacts’ that are rational but speculative, conceived from and for the redemption of the landscape. Artifacts that will eventually disappear, allowing a new self-regenerating piece of mangrove to reappear, procedures built upon digital technologies.

The artifact, composed of a thin steel plate, is positioned vertically among shrubs, water reservoirs, and soil. Surrounded by a growing anthropic saline edge, the artifacts are placed to regenerate a new hyper-mangrove edge adapted to the current demands of the ecosystem. The artifact decomposes to compose the landscape. The physicality of the piece becomes informed from real data of the place, translated to physical-digital procedures that undergo robotic simulations, and materialize what we call the hyper-artifact.

Exposed to winds, salt, and rainwater, the panels of the enclosure gradually detach, revealing the inner steel fossil, the sole vestige that will persist for a longer duration. The panels vary in materiality and, consequently, in temporality. Time leaves a trace of the object’s decomposition as it unveils the composition of the new edge.

In the short term, the artifact builds new biological and biodiverse dynamics. Mosses, lichens, and microorganisms grow, animals interact, and water falls vertically. Condensed from its humid state, the water drains and filters to become accessible to local fishermen.