Polygraph: a palimpsest pigment factory: a colour plant as a recording device for the sedimented scars on Johannesburg's mining landscape
Date
2015-04-29
Authors
Vally, Sumayya
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The mining that gave rise
to Johannesburg as a city
has left in its wake pieces
of geologically disturbed,
disused, and unusable
land. These leftover
fragments of landscape
carry with them, not
only memory of the city’s
foundations, but scars of
the mining processes that
now render them unusable
- Not only do these vaguescapes
have potential for
the memory within them to
be unearthed, but they
are highly polluted, and
seek to be reimagined as
productive city spaces.
The chosen site, an
abandoned piece of mineland
with a concealed old
mine shaft; on the edge of
a highway on the fringe of
the CBD, is simultaneously
highly visible to the
city, but forgotten to
it. Its positioning is
unique in that it allows
for the potential for
the extraction of the
mine pollutants and site
remediation to become a highly visible process.
Understanding and
uncovering layers and
traces of the site as means
of understanding what is
possible on this highly
polluted landscape became
an important architectural
and design generator. The
architecture consolidates
and reimagines the
fragments of ruin, both
physical and ephemeral,
contained on the site,
and curates the users
experience through these
forgotten traces. Its
programme - a colour plant,
which extracts useful
metallic colour pigments
from the contaminated
earth, becomes a visceral
reminder of these past
traces ;and a recording
device for the current
consequences of past
mining activity.
The approach is an almost
critical speculation. The
age of the picturesque
landscape is no more.
Our effects on the land have depleted the earth and
diseased its rhythms. But
these unstable consequences
hold possibilities that
can be engaged with
imaginatively; rather than
merely re-mediated. How can
architecture engage with
this instability?
The project accepts the
presence of rising acid
mine water; and imagines
a new reality emerging
from it. The project is a
comment on our own epoch;
one where waste, toxicity
and radiation are so
rife, that they are now a
quiet, sinister backdrop
to our world. More than
an apocalyptic future,
this project deals with a
dystopian present.
The precarious site
conditions pose questions
for an architecture
which can engage with
the instability, and not
merely withstand it. The
architectural concern is to
render visible and intensify
a consciousness of these traces, to investigate a
palimpsest infrastructure.
Colour, like architecture is
a link between the conscious
and the subconscious. It
is a mediator between
the realms. It holds
possibilities for suggesting
and molding atmospheres and
perceptions.
The architecture negotiates
all the realms, concerned
with past, present and
future.
It consolidates and makes
apparent the traces but it
is also developed with an
awareness that it becomes
part of these traces.
It is an intervention
which aims to heighten an
awareness of the presence
of the past in the life of
the city;
and also as palimpsest
infrastructure; as a
recording device for the
geological happenings of
the earth.