Site 01: Living Soil Library
Site 02: quarry for rock-time
Site 03: soil-sensitive walk
Site 04: healing soil garden
HISTORICAL SITE RESEARCH
Methodology: This research into the region of the Lost River Subbasin draws on three types of primary sources: visual and document archives, maps, and in-person site visits. While analyzing each of these sources separately gives some insight into the history of a place, I look for the way they intersect to read a more complex place-based history that allows for agency in multiple places: the visible agency of government and policy seen in maps and common historical narratives; the hidden agency of marginalized communities or individuals which as read through photo archives and in-person interviews; and the material agency of the physical environment which underlies all three sources. Archives and maps are already presented to us through a particular point of view that sparked their creation and dissemination. This inevitably emphasizes some things and hides others. By triangulating different archives and maps with a physical site, I speculate a complex place-based history from the spaces in-between.
Ground holds material remains of trauma: the foundation for a guard tower on the perimeter of the former internment camp, where armed guards would patrol the barbed wire .
Archival Research into the politics of soil: Lava rock as a source of cultural power and resistance for the Modoc people, transformed into gardens of resistance by the Japanese prisoners of Tule Lake Internment Center
Archival research into the politics of materials: cultivation of epos roots by indigenous people, farming of turnips by the internees, potatoes as a cash crop.
