Maxwell Fertik

A Contaminated landscape

This project does not pretend to be a solution but rather a highly contextual provocation to reframe our relationship to the post-industrial environment. At its core, is the disrupted Providence landscape and the ways nature and our minds have mutated accordingly. This thesis is not just about Japanese Knotweed but uses it as a window through which to discuss the entanglements of industry and ecology. 

The ++ that is seen throughout, is a symbol of abundance and addition.

Structuring repair

The second, Indeterminate Structures of Repair addresses the entanglement of human and nonhuman growth made tangible by invasive species. It also calls for the need to harness this relationship to develop reparative networks in humankind. Combining sculpture and research in design for the end of the world, these forms put forward a novel material from the local flora to provide agency to non-human nature.

Knotweed “silverware”

The third object, at the hands-on scale, deals directly with history and context. These act as a critique of Gorham Silver by casting “silverware” from knotweed powder and covering the ends with actual silver done using an electroplating method.

Silver is in the DNA of Providence soil. Even if it is microscopic, the effects of the fine silver industry of Providence left traces locally. Gorham Silver Manufacturing, at its peak, was the largest fine silverware manufacturer in the world. The complex was a 37-acre industrial site that included over 30 buildings located between Mashapaug Pond and Adelaide Avenue in the Reservoir Triangle neighborhood of Providence. The complex was in continuous operation from its opening in 1890 until 1986. The Smithsonian archives of American art show the Gorham foundry over 700 times in its inventory of American sculpture. Today, the area has been hastily redeveloped with a high school and shopping plaza while the soil and water continue to leach trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), into the groundwater. These chemicals were used to clean metal and machine parts.

Nonetheless, silver is not only a symbol of immense wealth but equally, environmental degradation. While masterful in its contribution to decorative arts, everything silver represents today is that of contamination and disregard for natural systems. Not to mention the environmental racism toward the Narragansett Tribe who once called Mashapaug Pond their home and for thousands of years, worked to steward this land.

This cutlery is meant as a response to the environmental impacts of Gorham Manufacturing Company, nearly 50 years after they shut their doors. While producing fine silverware for the wealthiest families, locally and abroad, Gorham dumped toxic solvents and polishing agents into Mashapaug Pond Today this area, once fishable/swimmable, is completely overrun by invasive species and toxic algaes that thrive in these disrupted environments. As the ecosystem begins to recover, this project questions, how might we work with this “new wild” instead of trying to eradicate it? How might we use the tools of function to subvert the model of growth?

1000 Plants Side Table

In collaboration with Sam Aguirre (MFA FD 24), we created a small side table out of knotweed pulp mixed with paper and cotton pulp and cornstarch as a binder. Designed with inspiration coming from industrial, concrete infrastructure, this object embodies similar values to the Indeterminate Structures of Repair but with an added element of function. This table is made out of the organic post-industrial byproduct and degrades back into the earth once its usage is done.

Local Histories

The context exists at the crossroads of two histories: the first is Providence, Rhode Island. Providence was once (1890-1900) home to five of the largest factories in the world. For tools (Brown & Sharpe), files (Nicholson File), steam engines (Corliss Steam Engine), screws (American Screw) and fine silver goods (Gorham Silver).

By 1950, many of these major manufacturers moved on and left much of their infrastructure and waste behind. Gorham Silver, for example, left an incredibly toxic legacy on the Rhode Island environment. Once the largest fine silver manufacturer in the world, Gorham was in every high society household in America, even the Lincoln White House. Today its former home on Mashapaug Pond is practically poisoned with heavy metals and dioxins left behind by the silver dynamo. Today it is currently undergoing an ongoing but endless bioremediation. Mashapaug Pond was once the winter village of the Narragansett peoples who have been continually displaced by these industries are then left with a poisoned body of water that is teeming with toxic algaes and will take years of healing and repair to make it swimmable or drinkable again. The soil around this pond, as well as every other formerly industrial site is also weakened, and full of toxins, unable to supply plants and animals the proper nutrients or immunity to thrive. Think about what happens when nothing else can survive in an environment, who can live in these conditions?

Unintended Consequences

The second timeline begins in late 1700s Japan, on a rocky, lush mountainside in Nagasaki prefecture:

Japanese Knotweed ((虎杖) is native to the most volcanic regions of Japan but was documented by white, European botanists on Mount Unzen in Nagasaki. It is a hardy, tall, rhizomatic perennial that resembles a more leafy bamboo with stunning white flowers. It spreads via rhizome like ginger or turmeric, reproducing via cloning and branching horizontally underground.

This plant was introduced to soil in Britain in the late 1700s. However, it was officially brought to Britain from a Volcano in Japan by the famous German botanist, Philippe Von Siebold. He knew it would gain popularity due to the 1800s obsession with anything Eastern or Japanese at the time and its popularity was thoroughly bolstered by “exoticism.” Around 1850, a specimen from this plant was donated by Siebold to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. By the 1870s, there were even sightings of hybrids between two different types of knotweed documented in Britain. The beginnings of its rapid spread could have been noted at this point but were largely ignored due to its popularity.

By 1904, it was documented in North America, and by this time, a hybrid was renamed Mammoth Knotweed for its sheer size and magnitude, growing as tall as 16 feet at times. Clearly, this plant that is accustomed to rocky, volcanic soil had no trouble thriving in the American soil with no natural predators. By 1950, the plant escaped cultivation and spread in Rhode Island although it was likely well established at least 50 years prior. This coincides with the industrial decline in Providence and the resultant polluted soil; the perfect environment for it to thrive and dominate with nothing competing with it and nothing to do but grow.

Cooperative Knotweed Field Day

As a way of supplementing the objects, this project involved the community of Providence and Pawtucket in a knotweed field day in the valley beside the East Side Train tunnel. Tapping into the fort thunder listserv and the RISD community, this event allowed the public to engage with and learn about knotweed and explore this prime post-industrial site. This site represents an area of neglected industrial infrastructure filled with knotweed but by engaging with it, it is also a perfect place to imagine this vegetative utopia, a forest of abundance.

Not only was it a gathering with a purpose, to harvest more knotweed for my raft, but it was a way of involving the community in a hands-on activity around invasives that respected the plant and acknowledged its power over that region instead of seeing it as an enemy. The group also learned how to make bundles from the material which brought about many ideas about lightweight building materials, plywoods, or even shelters made from these bundles. Of course, none of this is new. Building from what we have around us has been done by indigenous communities for thousands of years. But by bringing back into the present and using an organic byproduct of industry, this project envisions a vegetative utopia based on abundance over extraction and embraces the entanglement of industry and invasive ecosystems we set in place.

Afterword

In the end, this project envisions an alternative mode of design based on abundance over extraction and a utopia of radical care for even the most hated weeds. Japanese Knotweed was one example but there could be thousands of others in a thousand other disrupted landscapes.

This project can tell the story of knotweed and its introduction to postindustrial Providence but this story can be told in so many others. These are just three ++plays that consider post-industrial resilience but this project challenges designers to consider the disrupted landscape as a human-made space that is troubled but abundant with possibilities.

We close by asking: What will artists and designers bring to the end of the world?