climate

futures


On view at the Liberty Research Annex
October 17, 2024 - January 1, 2025


about
projects
  1. 22/26 Midwest
  2. Ambiguous Territory
  3. Annotation and Insulation
  4. Asutsuare Rebound
  5. Atlas of the Trans-Apocalypse
  6. Becoming Biomass
  7. Bespoke Ultra-Thin Layered 3D-printed Reusable Wood-Bio-Based Formwork for Casting Complex Concrete Geometries
  8. Branch Wall: Geometrically Informed Non-Planar Toolpath and Material Deposition
  9. Deploy 2.0
  10. Detroit Cultural Center
  11. Elephant in the Room, and Other Fables
  12. Fabric-Formed Unstabilized Poured Earth
  13. Frie(s/d)
  14. Functionally Graded Additive Manufacturing
  15. Guidance for Designing and Implementing Constitutionally Valid Local Plans and Regulations to Protect Landmarked Trees, Woodlands, and Tree Canopy in Michigan
  16. Heat and Housing: Co-producing Passive Cooling Strategies and Promoting Health in Informal and Precarious Settlements
  17. Hygroscopic Envelope: Building Enclosures for Climate Adaptation
  18. In My Backyard
  19. In-Svalbard: Cold Coast Atlas
  20. Land, Foodways, and Kinship: The Case of Palestinian Villages
  21. Light Forms
  22. MiCE Architecture: Design Strategies to Mitigate Michigan Coastal Erosion
  23. Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
  24. Myco-Composite Furniture
  25. Post Rock Post-Industrial Plastic Facade
  26. re:FE Reimagining Mining Waste from a Wounded Region
  27. Shell Wall: Coupling Non-Planar Robotic 3D Concrete Printing and Topology Optimization
  28. Solar Technology Integration on Building Facades
  29. The Canopy
  30. The Lifespan Project
  31. Unfolding Forms of Conveyance
  32. Urban Climate Law Series
  33. Vertical Wetlands





The Lifespan Project
Bénédicte Boisseron, Meg Sweeney, Mireille Roddier                            2024

30

The Lifespan Project interrogates the concept of lifespan in things material and immaterial, as it looks at the used, the rotten, the obsolete, death, and grief. A team composed of students in Architecture, English, and Comparative Literature, and three faculty members from Architecture, AfroAmerican and African Studies, English, and Women’s and Gender Studies worked on this video installation, weaving together three distinct stories, at once personal and collective, from France, Ghana, and the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Mireille Roddier’s narrative takes us to Burgundy, France, as she reflects on a bygone era of local energy autonomy and sustainably regenerative subsistence that neither necessitated the importation of externally produced goods nor the consequential exportation of waste. She uses the commodification of water as an opportunity to reflect on the larger question of sewage and general waste accumulation in the modern world. Bénédicte Boisseron ties her brother’s untimely passing to an environmental scandal in the French Caribbean Islands. Through reflections on the colonial role of pesticide in banana plantations, Boisseron addresses her personal grief while interrogating the lifespan of human life, colonial history, and a banana. Meg Sweeney traveled to Accra, Ghana to study the devastating environmental and labor consequences of “dead white man’s clothes”: vast quantities of secondhand clothing—at least 40% of which is deemed textile waste—sent to Ghana every week from the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Through the theme of water, The Lifespan Project’s triptych film offers a powerful reflection on the human and environmental dimensions of consumption, waste, circularity, and reuse.

Additional credits:
CC Barick, PhD candidate, Comparative Literature (LSA); Yumna Dagher, Earth and Environmental Sciences (LSA); Elisabeth Fertig, PhD, Comparative Literature (LSA); Rowan Freeman, Architecture (Taubman College); Nicole Tooley, BS Architecture (Taubman College) and BA English Language and Literature (LSA)