The Duck Farm - Ephrata, WA

Territory as a Palimpsest of Memories

Just as the pages of a medieval Illuminated book were created by washing, erasing and reusing vellums of Greek and Latin texts, so is a territory; a densely populated community of signs and events overlaying and erasing the older or obsolete, though these erasures never entirely disappear. Modern technologies allow us to retrieve and interpret the original documents once thought to be lost without loosing the medieval text. In the same way every territorial plan, a park as a road or house as a factory, we must consider what is already written on the land; what the land is telling us in both explicit and hidden ways. This attention is prejudicial to any successful project.