Another Final Frontier: Kennedy Space Center & Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (2020)
a collaboration with Shona Kitchen and Charlie Hailey with contributions from NASA Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Indian River Anthropological Society, and Canaveral National Seashore.
A public program and site specific installation on a manmade island in Kennedy Space Center & Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. Participants kayaked to the island where they were greeted by the artists and guided through the installation. The programs featured talks on the relationship between NASA and Fish and Wildlife Services, the formation of the Intracoastal Waterway, and the pre and post contact history of Indian River Lagoon.
Another Final Frontier exhibits work that combines artistic production with design and field research carried out on a spoil island that occupies both the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Dredged for Intracoastal Waterway, the island is one of thousands that make up a linear archipelago that stretches from New York City to Brownsville, Texas. The center of the exhumed dirt, shell, and limestone feels—and looks—like the surface of the moon, while the island’s edges bristle with native and exotic species of plants and wildlife. A frontier between land and water as well as nature and human intervention, the island serves as a test case for alternative habitats on the margins of human habitation, not on far-flung moons or planets, but here on earth, in a place that is essentially hiding in plain sight, just offshore (but harboring mainland truths).
Given this context and as a mode of critical reflection, the project appropriates and modifies strategies developed by NASA to explore the lunar surface, turning those instruments and tools back onto the terrestrial and aquatic landscape of the spoil islands. Another Final Frontier’s collaborative team, an architect and two multidisciplinary artists, also tests the capacity of creative practice to study marginal places and built environments where change, rather than stability, is the rule. The installation takes place on land built from dredged spoil. On one level, the exhibit creates another permutation of the spoil island expedition and camp and invites the public to experience architecture tuned to sites where nature is spoiled but thriving and artificial land is naturalized but constantly changing. At another level, the exhibit places the evidence gathered—such as taxonomies of spoil island wildlife that update natural histories and emergent topographies that catalogue “artificial histories”—in the context of broader questions of architecture’s role in conservation, exploration, and development. At a third level, with a speaker series and ready relocation to other critical sites in the archipelago, the exhibit speculates about the future of existing waste sites where techno-ecological hybrids make up another frontier of research and habitation.
Generously supported by Rhode Island School of Design, A Day Away Kayaks, NASA Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, and F.Domes.
