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. It is a void below the horizon — an inverse of the remaining Cahokia mounds above. The pond rests in the American Bottom, a confluence of rivers, histories, and ongoing corporate occupation. 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 cast-iron columns is a 'deep pit' used by the foundry that, over decades, has morphed into a ruderal wetland.

 

The pond is an archive nestled within the museum's collection; both receive and hold material histories and accumulations. The pond's impervious basin 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.

This body of water is also an oasis for non-human inhabitants of the land, despite the legacy of environmental contamination. Each time I visit, I see new signs of life. Crayfish slip from ceramic tubes, ducks paddle across the surface, and frogs shoot from the mud upon feeling the vibration of my footsteps. Raccoons, cranes, and canines leave traces in the silty soil. When spring rains fill the basin, my deaccessioning is interrupted, so I turn to the pond's perimeter. I document native and ruderal species: Horseweed erupts through coarse gravel. Phragmites (Common reed) and Interior Sandbar Willow stand tall in dark loam. Heartleaf peppervine, Trumpet vine, and Riverbank Grape weave an impassable canopy above the inlet, where water enters after traveling down rooftops and over and under impervious surfaces, feeding the soft vessel that supports this resilient ecosystem. 

 

Through special recording equipment and a 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.

When one's gaze shifts from macro to micro, the pond is a lush oasis of resilience and regeneration. Activities in, around, and in response to this site-within-a-site acknowledge the duality of ecological abundance and environmental complexity, and celebrate the persistence and resilience of all entities that inhabit this ecosystem. The pond is a place for reflection and contemplation —  about what can't be undone, what might be preserved, and what can be remediated and reimagined for a regenerative future.