Drawn Together
Un/bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability seminar reflection
In designing and operating large-scale infrastructures, humans tend toward fixity—despite increasingly dynamic conditions, such as those at play in the Mississippi River Delta context. The Anthropocene River Campus seminar “Un/bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability” sought to explore the multi-scalar effects of such human interventions, and how new futures might be imagined that engage and work with these dynamics. To do so, the seminar employed the practice of drawing as its core methodology, not only to record and understand current conditions but also to devise new approaches and imaginaries. In this reflection, seminar convener Aron Chang explains why drawing represented such an apt tool, the different forms it took and outcomes it produced throughout the seminar, and how it enabled connections to be drawn far beyond the immediate context of New Orleans.
And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.
—Amitav Ghosh1
The 1944 Fisk maps of the Lower Mississippi River that adorned the program cover for the Anthropocene River Campus: The Human Delta are immediately captivating. It’s not just the light greens, oranges, yellows, pinks, and reds intersecting and swirling across the page, or the interplay of curves tracing the meanders of the river against the underlying cartographic grid; the real power of these drawings, I believe, is in their fantastical nature. They speak to an unimaginable world in which a river runs rampant, sweeping to and fro across the landscape, riverbanks and watercourse shifting by miles even within the lifespan of a single human.
In contrast, the ways in which we represent and think about the landscape today are rooted in stability, even though it is clear that large-scale shifts in landscapes are well upon us—in the form of rising seas and sinking marshlands, retreating glaciers and melting ice sheets, cataclysmic floods, wildfires obliterating entire towns, and climbing temperatures redefining climate regions and entire ecosystems. We understand the places we inhabit to be fixed in place, findable via GPS coordinates.
Our infrastructural systems and our political discourse, even as we speak of retreat and “climate refugees,” cannot countenance truly dynamic conditions. In the Mississippi River Valley and the Mississippi River Delta, the latter being the context of the River Campus seminar “Un/bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability” was engaged with, fixity drives policy and practice. We build and reinforce levees to keep the river from overflowing or breaking through its banks. We dredge the river bottom to maintain shipping channels. We build water intakes and sewage outflows for neighboring communities that are predicated upon the river staying where it is. If the river changes course, our communities would suffer, and our very state lines would change. We can scarcely imagine what we see in the Fisk maps: an environment in which the river regularly jumps its banks, and where human settlements change with the seasons and with the varying flow of water and sediment.
To prepare for this seminar, a multi-disciplinary group of organizers and conveners—Aron Chang, Jorg Sieweke, Dorothy Jelagat Cheruiyot, Derek Hoeferlin, and Nikiwe Solomon—came together several months prior via web conferences to determine the primary methodology to organize the seminar around. What practice, what process, would be capacious and flexible enough to support a diverse group of seminar participants in studying the control of the Mississippi River at multiple scales, along with its ecology and history? What would allow us to engage Nikiwe’s introduction of multi-species ethnography alongside an exploration of microbes, algae, insects, and plants with Jelagat? Or to engage the landscape-scale analysis and diagramming of Jorg and Derek alongside the lived experiences and community-based perspectives of local experts Tanya James and Greta Gladney, or the scientific perspective of Cyndhia Ramatchandirane?
We chose to build the seminar around the practice of drawing, with the goal of building from small individual drawings to large wall-sized compositions co-created by seminar participants. We asked: how can drawing support different modes of exploration and learning? How can drawing enrich dialogue and support multi-disciplinary practice? And how can drawing support the imagining of new futures for the Mississippi?
Over the course of the seminar, we used drawings to tell each other about ourselves, to collect spatial data, to trace ecological relationships, to express questions and concerns, to make connections, and to envision new delta landscapes. Participants created drawings during every phase, as described in the following collection of texts and images. Using pen, markers, tape, copier paper, large rolls of paper, and artifacts collected at the riverfront, we created hundreds of drawings over the course of three days.
Importantly, we also came up against the limits and fallibility of drawing, including how a strict emphasis on drawing lifts up some voices and forms of knowledge, while marginalizing other forms of knowledge and cultural practices (e.g., oral traditions). And also how the representation of environments and systems as lines, dashes, patterns, and colors too often elides human histories of racialized control, colonization, enslavement, displacement, and ongoing environmental injustice in the service of a false objectivity.
Day 1: Introductions, flow, and the levee
The seminar kicks off at Tulane with each participant creating multiple drawings representing “flow.” Our goal is to lead off with a creative activity and to establish drawing as something we will return to over and over again. Eschewing the standard spoken “intros round”, each participant uses their cards to introduce themselves to another person. Then, each participant introduces their partner to the whole group using their partner’s drawing. This initial activity gives us a chance learn what is on each other’s minds, and also to lift up the creative instincts of each participant.
Later in the afternoon, we climb onboard a bus and head upriver and into the Leonidas neighborhood to visit New Orleans’s drinking water intake—this connection to the Mississippi is one of the ways in which New Orleanians are dependent on the current path of the river. We create sectional drawings documenting the boundary between city and river, which is an earthen levee that keeps the Mississippi from inundating low-lying neighborhoods. We also trace the pipe that carries water from the river over the levee and towards the city’s water purification plant, which supplies drinking water to the city. By using our bodies to measure changes in distance and elevation and using sectional drawings to document those findings, we become more attuned to the scale of infrastructure and also the flows that cross the boundary between city and river.
Day 2: The spillway, boundaries, and displacement
On Day 2, we take a bus out to the Bonnet Carré Spillway, a massive flood control structure located upriver of New Orleans in St. Charles Parish. Our interest is in the ways in which engineered forms both restrict and permit flow, and in examining relationships along and across the boundary formed by river levees and the spillway structure. We continue to draw using clipboards and markers, but also bring with us jars and bags in which to collect artifacts for the next day’s drawings.
On the way to and from the Spillway, Greta Gladney asks us to consider her family’s long history living alongside the river and in the delta, both in St. Charles Parish and in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. River floods and hurricanes in conjunction with public policies and practices for river control and hurricane protection have displaced her family multiple times in just the past century. Today, a proposal to expand the lock structure where the Industrial Canal draws ships from the Mississippi once again threatens to displace many of the Lower Ninth Ward’s residents.
Back from the Spillway visit at Tulane, one group sorts and analyzes the biological samples we’ve collected while another group learns about the history of technologies used for river control as understood through patent applications. Tanya James challenges those of us working as designers, planners, engineers, and scientists to rethink how we do our work to address the racial inequality, injustices, and violence embodied in present day infrastructures and their histories. For example, how do we think about, represent, and talk about the Mississippi River levees and their future if we understand that these levees were built up by enslaved people to protect the plantations and colonial society that held these people in bondage? And that those same levees now protect the chemical plants and refineries that poison the air and water of African American communities founded by the descendants of those enslaved people?
The two groups come back together, and discussion coalesces around taking the notion of speculation that had been central to the seminar at the start, and using speculation to try to ask and answer questions about how we do our work. To close out the day, we ask participants to use cards to record their thoughts, questions, and concerns heading into the last day of the seminar.
Day 3: Scale, negotiation, and possible futures
We organize Day 3 around co-creating large drawings. Dialog, questioning, and ideation become tangible through the arranging of artifacts and through markmaking. Working together in this way requires coming to agreement on structure and principles, form and technique. How will we use this big sheet of paper? What is top, what is bottom? How do we reinterpret materials, draw connections, or add new ideas?
In the first activity, all participants array drawings, artifacts, biological samples, and other materials from Days 1 and 2 on giant piece of paper to articulate relationships between different phenomena, scales, and systems.
To wrap up, we organize ourselves around sets of ideas that are visible on the BIG drawing, and work in smaller groups to create new drawings representing possible futures for the river and the delta. With less than an hour to create our drawings, we use materials already at hand. We seek to communicate underlying principles and organizational structures rather than attempting to imagine what each possible future will look like. We tear open plastic cups and use wedges of plastic to represent extraction and toxicity as well as the arpent lines of plantations. We simulate a healthy wetland environment using paper, tape, and plants collected at the Spillway. We use tape to literally create a mesh network with no beginning and with no end.
Each of the drawings and visual artifacts we create is a drawing “of” something rather than “about” something. If you tug on the web of blue tape one group creates, for example, every other part of the network moves too. The drawing embodies the principles of interconnectedness and mutual dependency we are seeking to represent. The forested wetland another group creates is a model of a new kind of ecosystem where humans are not the prime actors—the three-dimensional drawing contains within it the very sediments and seeds that would be necessary to seed such an ecosystem. And we discover new organizational and representational possibilities along the way. The segments of blue tape used to bind plants to paper form their own pattern, offering additional representational opportunities.
Aesthetically, these drawings are unruly, even ugly. They exist not as an articulation of a singular vision, but as the product of negotiation and improvisation by many—groups of artists, biologists, anthropologists, landscape architects, social workers, geologists, filmmakers, and teachers still getting to know each other, each with a hand in creation and none with ultimate control. It is perhaps more apt to think about these drawings in terms of world building, which is why the co-creation of these drawings—describing worlds as radical as the one seen in the Fisk maps from 1944—suggests exciting possibilities for multi-disciplinary, creative work in a time of crisis and conflict.
Drawing as an exploratory, co-creative process is one way can come together to share different forms of knowledge and to develop and communicate ideas formed out of diverse perspectives. With limited time and limited materials, we end up relying on observation and listening, synchronizing the imaginations and hands of many co-creators, and the serendipity of materials. The process of making each drawing relies on our ability to build trust and understanding between co-creators and to find ways to work together. It asks us to engage both the physical properties and the symbolic value of tape, water, plant cuttings, mold, paper, cardboard, plastic, tar balls, words, and markings. With these humble materials, we can help each other draw connections between local conditions and global trade. We can make tangible interdependencies between our respective forms of knowledge, between humans and other species, and between the our past, present, and future. And we can both make visible and reimagine our own disciplinary practices even as we reimagine the myriad flows of water, soils, life, capital, and toxins that shape our existence, often through, over, under, and around the hard lines we’ve drawn in the landscape in order to control the Mississippi and its delta.
These are the very skills and practices that we will need to fashion more just futures for ourselves and the ecosystems we inhabit as we look to transform watersheds, rivers, deltas, and infrastructural systems in the face of climate change, sinking coastlines, environmental pollution, and centuries of environmental injustice.
