Unfamiliar Territory proposes ways in which we could productively engage with places of friction, or more specifically, with unfamiliarity of disturbed sites without reducing their complexity or eliminating their creative potential for the sake of ‘familiarization’. The project focuses on Fort de Vaujours, an abandoned nuclear contaminated site and an area of future gypsum extraction near Paris.
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In times when novel approaches to contaminated sites are largely needed, the project with its alternative take on design methodologies rejects the fallacies of instant ‘solutions’ and puts forward a performative approach to design: combining landscape’s performative capacities with its power of cultural expression, in time striving towards a multitude of affective encounters with ethically and politically enabling potentials.
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The project’s main challenge is to approach landscape intervention as a constant action - as creating a set of potentials that can unfold in various directions with various outcomes. An element of control persists and the proposal does not deny a certain amount of order, but instead of fixing the boundaries within which landscape processes flow and play out, works with precise moments when the set boundaries shift and transformation occurs. In this way, differences that drive landscape processes are kept alive without reducing the complexity of the system they find themselves in. The proposed landscape intervention is not expected to have immediate effects. In fact, if successful, its most powerful effects are observed in the long run.
