Located near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers sits a piece of land laden with conflicts and grievances, where forced treaties were signed to expel its original inhabitants. Today, ironically, it is a place where coal extracted from faraway Native American Reserves turns into piles of poisonous ash for St. Louis’s electric supply.
The “Observatory for Land Disfigurement” is an act of quiet defiance that fully acknowledges the violent past and continuously violent present of this site. By literally containing a segment of this land, users participate actively, by upcycling coal ash into precast concrete production, and passively, by experiencing an imprisoned “nature” with its uncanny tranquility.
A specimen of the present tense, the Observatory refuses to whitewash history by providing one or another particular representation of the site’s past. Its brutal display of the as-is testifies to the absurdity of our relationships with our environment and our history.
