Edifice

The “Edifice” collage series combines original images of the Amazon rainforest with images of a building we encountered there. This building was constructed to house a private university called Politécnica Ecológica Amazónica that had the dubious mission of educating the local population, including indigenous people, in western science and business management. When the university failed, the jungle started taking it back. We think of it like Smithson’s “ruins in reverse,” in the sense that the building exists in a state that anticipates its future. However, unlike Smithson’s term that assumes the inevitability of industrial development, here the jungle is asserting its own right to opacity and inner logic of growth.

Part of the large Crystal Forest body of work.