Jeanne Astrup Chauvaux - wild infrastructures
how to approach, represent and include the complexity of urban wetlands in our urban narratives?
‘Wild infrastructures’ investigates the dense network of relationships between urban and infrastructural grids and the spontaneous development of ecosystems within them.
The focus of the research is set on a particular typology called “Urban Wetland”.
wet-lands being the liminal spaces (or ecotones) where two ecosystems meet and blur into one another, creating a particularly rich field of interactions between different forms of life. But “Urban Wetlands” do so in an already complex context: an urban one.
Urban Wetlands are places of vivid interactions and a proper maze made of waters, grounds, organic mater growing and decomposing, birds migrating, cars driving by, people engaging closely
or looking at it from a distance. Like many others hard-to- define spaces, urban wetlands are often overseen in city planing, because they are complex spaces wich can’t be understood if only looked at from above. They are entangled in the mess of capitalist urban development, too often based on dynamics of profit, demolition and growth.
The greater part of this research has taken place within urban wetlands. From the end of Autumn through the cold winter months and until the first days of spring I have approached, wandered
through, looked at, listened, observed, felt, in one word “visited” (Vinciane Despret) urban wetlands throughout Northern Europe.
In theses different spaces I collected images, sounds and stories, which I decided to re-assemble into one fictional — yet coherent, urban wetland in wich I explored the perspectives of 5 different protagonists.
The result of this research is a 5-channels video installation displaying the interaction of each protagonists with the fictional wetland and a 300x120cm axonometric
section which were shown at UdK Berlin and at the Floating University Berlin. This installation was an attempt to display the complexity of the relations I have experienced, their simultaneity and
the sometimes brutal conflicts resulting from a neo-capitalist, profit oriented urban development against the natural succession of ecosystems.
watch the trailer here :
https://vimeo.com/728165649
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