Menu
38.627° -90.199°

Field Station 3: Anthropocene Vernacular

Industry, Indigeneity, and Empire

The St. Louis region is an irreducible landscape that carries the memories, meanings, and anxieties of millennia of settlement overlain on a metropolitan area grappling with the persistent, interconnected legacies of industry, race, and empire. Here, the Mississippi River is a hydraulic cleave through a territory that is rife with contradiction: once the meeting point of the tribes of the Osage and the Illinois, the Cahokia and the Missouri; once a boundary between empires; once a line between the free and the enslaved; still a real and conceptual divide to collective imagination and action. Along this river, which troubles the totalizing binaries of corporations and individuals, environmental devastation and renewal, rural and urban geography, distant past and uncertain present, these latent histories and liminal boundaries rise to the surface and resist any form of clean analysis, any easy narrative closure.

Read More
by Jennifer Colten, 2018
Projects

View Credits