Under the Power Lines

Bird Sanctuary
Richard DeKorte Park, Meadowlands, NJ

Under the Power Lines aims to complicate perceptions of the relationship between the human and non-human, moving past easy oppositional framings towards a more contingent and dialectical one.

The New Jersey Meadowlands exist between the natural and the human-made, at once a nature preserve, hub for bird watchers, urbanized area, sport complex, shopping destination, light industrial center, and landfill that has been riven by infrastructure for cars, trains, planes, and electricity. Nature and humanity have long been considered antagonistic and the Meadowlands may seem like a particularly visible site in the fight between humankind’s will to remake the landscape to their own liking and the vicissitudes of biogeophysical processes and non-human life.

However, the reality of the Meadowlands is of wary coexistence between these forces, the product of an uneasy truce where neither has been successful in erasing the other. Appropriating the aesthetic language of the power lines, the veins that carry the lifeblood of contemporary life, with a tensegrity/gerberette structural system for a bird hospital, nesting structures, and boardwalk heightens the bizarre quality of the Meadowlands, undermines the perceived permanence of existing infrastructures, and asks whether structures for non-humans are infrastructural.