For the past several years I have been very interested, maybe a little obsessed with the ephemeral waters of Islais Creek. The driving idea that keeps hounding me is that somehow we traded a magnificent wetland and creek to build a freeway, warehouses, and quick oil change establishments – all things so expendable for a hydrological system tens of thousands of year in the making. When did this bargain get made? Did one person or a small group of people make it? Or was the process more piecemeal?
However it was decided, the result is a tragically subjugated waterway – subterranean, invisible, and forgotten by most.
My proposal revolves around the idea of being subversive to this invisibility. My primary motivation is to bring back to memory what once was and provide people with the opportunity to think about what would lead us to bury a creek.
The current situation of Islais Creek is ripe with meaning: invisibility, subterranean flow, water flow replaced by auto/people flow, geological layering and historical layering, our inability to totally subjugate the creek, as well as many others.
At this raw stage of development my proposal has two main parts: a simple installation using copies of historical maps and a self-guided tour to sites in the watershed where one can sense the presence of the creek.
Layered Map Installation
I propose to create a layered installation using copies of historical maps with more recent ones on top, the bottom layers revealing some of the creek’s past incarnations. They would be fastened to board with rusty staples and exposed to the element to fade and deteriorate. Selective areas of the top layers would be torn to reveal layers of the past. The idea is to make it look like some of the layered masses of pamphlets on telephone poles that you can find in some of our neighborhoods. It is suggestive of archeology.
Self-guided Walking Tour
There are about a dozen sites that I know of where the creek can still be sensed in some way. Some of these are very overt, such as the end of Cayuga Street where some of the houses have sandbags in front of them to fight the periodic floods that occur during the winter, while others are more subtle. For example, from the platform of the Glenn Park BART station you can see white streaks made of calcite from the seeping of creek waters through concrete of the station.
My proposal revolves around the idea of being subversive to this invisibility. My primary motivation is to bring back to memory what once was and provide people with the opportunity to think about what would lead us to bury a creek.
The current situation of Islais Creek is ripe with meaning: invisibility, subterranean flow, water flow replaced by auto/people flow, geological layering and historical layering, our inability to totally subjugate the creek, as well as many others.
At this raw stage of development my proposal has two main parts: a simple installation using copies of historical maps and a self-guided tour to sites in the watershed where one can sense the presence of the creek.
Layered Map Installation
I propose to create a layered installation using copies of historical maps with more recent ones on top, the bottom layers revealing some of the creek’s past incarnations. They would be fastened to board with rusty staples and exposed to the element to fade and deteriorate. Selective areas of the top layers would be torn to reveal layers of the past. The idea is to make it look like some of the layered masses of pamphlets on telephone poles that you can find in some of our neighborhoods. It is suggestive of archeology.
Self-guided Walking Tour
There are about a dozen sites that I know of where the creek can still be sensed in some way. Some of these are very overt, such as the end of Cayuga Street where some of the houses have sandbags in front of them to fight the periodic floods that occur during the winter, while others are more subtle. For example, from the platform of the Glenn Park BART station you can see white streaks made of calcite from the seeping of creek waters through concrete of the station.