A design project exploring the unravelling of a nuclear site
This photo series and silent film were made as part of a landscape architecture design project, which puts forward a proposal for the decommission of Dounreay Nuclear Power Plant, near Thurso. The project imagines the landscape as a loom, with strips of asphalt left across the site like a ‘warp’. Over time, the warp is overwritten by the ‘weft’ of waters, erosion, soils and ecologies, which weave a new pattern into the site. As a design that is determined by the agency of more-than-human systems and processes, the project puts forward a critical approach to landscape architecture, troubling traditional hierarchies between the designer and the designed, between the human and more-than-human.
FILM
Layers of fabric are printed with the site’s blueprint; individual threads are pulled out one by one to reveal the layer beneath, making visible the process of the site unravelling over time.