Tracing Our Mississippi
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Hadley Fruits, courtesy Exhibit Columbus
image credit: Derek Hoeferlin, Nathan Stanfield
image credit: Derek Hoeferlin, Nathan Stanfield
image credit: Derek Hoeferlin, Nathan Stanfield
Location:
Columbus, Indiana
Type:
Installation at Exhibit Columbus: New Middles
Curators:
Iker Gil, Mimi Zeiger
Construction:
Painted and sealed CNC'd Foam, vinyl, polycarbonate, painted plywood
Installation Team:
Derek Hoeferlin (lead designer), Nathan Stanfield (primary research assistant), Joel Leon, Weicong Huang, Qianshan Hu, Lindsey Compeaux (research assistants), Gregory Cuddihee (shop technician/design consultant)
"Watershed Weekend" Team:
Derek Hoeferlin (team lead), Nathan Stanfield, Angie Tillges, Monique Verdin, Paul Wu
Recognition:
Derek Hoeferlin invited participant as 2020-2021 University Design Research Fellow, representing Washington University in St. Louis
Published in Landscape Architecture Magazine, Archinect, Architectural Record, Wallpaper, The Architect's Newspaper, among several other media outlets
Videos featuring Tracing Our Mississippi:
Exhibition Duration:
August-November, 2021
Funding:
Exhibit Columbus
Washington University in St. Louis: Sam Fox School Creative Activity Research Grant, "The Divided City" Mellon Foundation Graduate Student Summer Research Fellowship, Walter B. Kromm Endowed Internship
Project Description:
“Tracing Our Mississippi” was an interactive installation with public programming at the site of the Columbus Pump House, on a terrace adjacent to the East Fork of the White River. By representing the Mississippi Watershed as a large-scale, abstracted model (composed as a set of moveable pieces), the installation emphasized the relentless infrastructures controlling the Mississippi’s landscapes, communities, and resources.
“Tracing Our Mississippi” translates Hoeferlin's Mississippi River Basin Atlas research into three-dimensions. It is intentionally abstracted, vertically exaggerated by 200 times and constructed 800,000 times smaller than the actual basin size. The model organizes into multiple portions and is a giant puzzle of sorts: 1) Missouri River Basin; 2) Arkansas-White-Red River Basin; 3) Lower Mississippi River Basina; and, 4) Upper Mississippi River Basin; and, 5) Ohio & Tennessee River Basins.
Layers of information overlay on and embed within the exaggerated topographies, levees and levee protected areas that are finished in white. Layers include: locks, dams, spillways and floodways as red monoliths, oil and natural gas pipeline networks as red dash-dot lines, ancestral tribal lands as solid black lines, state boundaries as black squares, and state names and cities as black labels.
Amplifying methods of control, the installation asks: “Is the Mississippi Watershed really a watershed anymore?” In such a context, what does it mean to empower all of us to question our past methods of control and power, with the hope of re-establishing new, collective understandings, in turn connecting all of us across ecological and cultural geographies? What would it mean to re-trace our Mississippi?
For more detailed information:
https://exhibitcolumbus.org/2021-exhibition/university-design-research-fellowship/derek-hoeferlin