Work of Wetness
Identity, Website, Archive
Designed in collaboration with Aslı Uludağ
workofwetness.com
Created as an archive of the research materials Aslı Uludağ compiled for her MA in Research Architecture at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. The website traces the work of wetness as it pertains to sustainable systems, using textures and symbols devised from the components that make up watery bodies to diagramatically represent their verticality.
Abstract
“Closed-system sustainability is presented as a solution to climate change, resource depletion and environmental contamination. Essentially, however, it serves as a spatial and technical fix to the ecological limits of anthropogenic modes of production. Composed of infrastructures and environmental policies, sustainable closed-systems demand constant expansion to sustain the production of accumulation. They enclose available resources and previously marginalized ecological bodies and continuously direct them towards agents that serve the system by extending its reach. Those who fail to adapt are eliminated, culminating in novel socio-ecological regimes and spatial conditions that amplify the inherent contradiction between modes of production and ecological bodies.
This research project follows wetness control systems in Westland, the Netherlands that grow across, above and deep below the surface to efficiently and sustainably make wetness productive. The project locates greenhouse horticulture in the centre of its diagram and extends it to the soilless growing technique, hydroponics, historic land reclamation and its legacy, the canal system, the national transition to geothermal energy, and environmental policies which form a network that designs the contemporary relationship between humans and wetness in the Netherlands. Guided by interviews and field work, this research reveals the extractive logics that shape closed-systems, exposes the politics of sustainable solutions, and follows the watery rebels of wetness towards a different mode of sustainability. ”
-Aslı Uludağ
