Abstract
Made Ground 2019-2021
A collaborative research project by Shona Kitchen, Aly Ogasian with writing by Charlie Hailey. Another Final Frontier: Spoil Island Habitat
GREY ISLAND, advocates for a rethinking and refocusing; rather than seeking to conquer the natu-ral world through technology. “We artistically and poetically suggest ways of reconnecting with the landscape at hand and understanding technology as existing within – rather than despite of – the natural environment.” GREY ISLAND cast the artists in the role of explorers approaching the Spoil is- lands of Kennedy Space Center as if it were new territory, as unfamiliar and unmapped as the surface of the moon. Positing that these islands offer new worlds, the project critically examines the notion that leaving Earth is the only way to ensure the survival of the human race.
We know that this island has been here for about seven decades. Spoil islands, like this one, are waste products from dredging channels. The focus is on the channels, which are measured and maintained, not on the islands, which, you might say, are left to their own devices. They are cast to the side and often overlooked, if not forgotten. This chain of spoil islands through the Mosquito Lagoon was formed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was cutting an east coast channel that would become the Intra-coastal Waterway. It was a channel with a long history.
Grey Island floats in two overlapping areas—a refuge and a space center, one founded on nature and the other on technology. Both came after the bucket and pipeline dredgers had laced the la-goon and the Indian River with spoil islands. Grey Island makes up two acres of the one hundred forty thousand that NASA acquired in 1962 to expand its exploration of space, specifically its lunar landing program. Look south from the island, between palm trunks and pepper tree limbs, and you can see the Vehicle Assembly Building on the horizon. That is where engineers assembled the rock-ets for the Apollo missions that sent us to the moon. If there were a large enough crane, the VAB could be lifted and placed over the island like the glass cover of a bell jar.
From this vantage point here on the spoil island, we have embarked on our own mission, exploring what we don’t know and training to live in a place exceedingly far and near, a place that is remark-able and yet also quite ordinary. A place forgotten in plain sight. We have found our own landing site amid the constellation that is this three thousand mile string of islands stretching from New York to Brownsville. It is hot, the mosquitoes cloud like moon dust, the ground is hard, and the sea is rising. We have traveled far into space without even leaving earth. “Another Final Frontier” explores archi-tectural habitats at the margins of earth’s habitability.