The world is more and more dotted with ‘lost landscapes’. These can be found in Superfund sites in the United States, or much of the former industrial landscapes of China and countless places in between. There is a need to develop a toolkit for how to make these legacies of our mistreatment of our planet again accessible.
In recent times, the understanding of how natural systems can be orchestrated to slowly adapt these spaces has made great advances. Simultaneously these spaces are more and more seen not merely as ‘no-go zones’ but as places of our shared cultural heritage that can be perceived as places of reflection, lessons learned, and opportunities for reinterpretation.
Chernobyl is perhaps THE example of a lost landscape. In the past decades, the landscapes have been managed and danger zones have been caped. How could we ‘design’ a series of cultural landscape evolutions that allow for visitors, adaptation, and cultural engagement? Could these spaces be test sites for new nature hybrids? Could these places permit installations that speak to the legacies they represent? What forms of co-habitation [plant, animal and human] could now take place in such areas?
The workshop is based in Kyiv from July 21-28. During the week, the participants, together with curators Peter Veenstra / LOLA landscape architects, Jason Hilgefort / Land + Civilization Compositions and Julian Restrepo / TALLER, consider new ways of thinking about nature, models of culturological representation and new concepts based on the case of Chernobyl.
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