Temporary Site — Other Fields

Public commission with the Newburgh Community Land Bank, Newburgh, NY, 2017 - ongoing.

Steel structure, reclaimed sandstone stairs, raised planter bed with corrugated aluminum retaining wall, geotextile, mustard plant monoculture.

Question: how to build a landscape when everything rots?

In Newburgh, a city cycling through growth and abandonment, we suggest Derrida’s biodegradable as landscape typology: not a return to dust but the ability to be re-absorbed; a foundation becomes a field becomes a theater becomes a foundation. "Temporary Site" digests and reconstructs an erased domestic architecture - front stoop, basement, bay window, gardens. The installation uses salvaged materials and a monoculture of yellow-blooming mustard to reanimate the footprints of demolished structures as a seasonal icon. In the near future, this planting bed will be used by a community garden, and eventually the sites will be transferred by the land bank to new owners. "A Temporary Site" is not landscape architecture with fixed conditions: instead, it digests and reconstructs an erased architecture which in turn anticipate its own purposes lost and re-imagined.

Artist-In-Vacancy is a new initiative organized by Diana Mangaser and Newburgh Community Land Bank to reanimate vacant and abandoned properties in the city; "Temporary Site" was realized with collaborative support from Atlas Industries and Millie Roy.

Press: Ben Schulman, "Lifting a Small Town Through a Land Bank Arts Program" on The Atlantic: Citylab

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