WHAT'S AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POND?

 

While foraging at the National Building Arts Center (NBAC) to make natural dyes for a weaving, I discovered an overlooked pond on the back of the site. The pond rests in the American Bottom, a confluence of rivers, indigenous histories, and discrimination. The village (Sauget, IL) was incorporated by Monsanto and is known for Superfund sites and toxic accumulations of PCBs. Today, NBAC preserves architectural artifacts among the infrastructure of the site's former foundry. Beyond concrete sand-casting bunkers, and adjacent steel trusses and columns is an excavated 'Deep Pit’, now a retention pond. It is a void below the horizon — an inverse of the remaining Cahokia mounds above.

 

The pond is an archive that receives and holds material histories, accumulations, and contradictory systems. It contains detritus from the foundry: grinding discs, rusty steel fragments, ceramic tubes, and slag, which I remove through a process of "Reverse Extraction," a small healing gesture toward the local landscape.

When spring rains fill the basin, my deaccessioning is interrupted, so I turn to the pond's perimeter. Each time I visit, I see new signs of life: crayfish, ducks, and frogs scurry, waddle, and hop through the water, and raccoons and cranes leave traces in the silty soil. I document native and ruderal species: Horseweed emerges through coarse gravel, and Common Reed and Interior Sandbar Willow stand in dark loam; their presence is abundant and seemingly intentional. Trumpet vine and Riverbank Grape weave an impassable canopy above the inlet. Water travels above and below impervious surfaces — from rain on rooftops and through drains and pipes under asphalt — to the soft vessel that is this pit-now-pond. 

 

Through special recording equipment and collaboration with the Fowler-Finn Lab, I hear insect songs transmitted through leaves and stems. 90% of their communication is imperceptible to humans. Access to an electron microscope revealed diatom fossils on a rusty steel fragment. These microscopic algae produce 20% of the oxygen humans breathe through photosynthesis. 
Their glassy cell walls are made of silica, a material that shifts between basins in the American Bottom. It is in sand from the River and foundry, in the stalks of Phragmites (Common Reed), and lines the pond.

By shifting one's gaze from macro to micro, the pond becomes a lush oasis and a site-within-a-site of resilience and regeneration. It holds systems and space — for observation, untangling, and innovation — and acknowledging what can't be undone.