The Geography of Nowhere: Retaining Walls & Highway Barriers

The Geography of Nowhere: Retaining Walls & Highway Barriers The alteration of terrain requires the movement of substrate by either excavating or filling crevasses in the earth. Such alteration of land, predominantly as a result of construction activities and particularly when creating big-box shopping plazas, ultimately results in drastic modification of the natural landscape from one that is largely indigenous in shape and form, to one which is man-made, sculpted to unnaturally steep slopes, and stabilized by inexpensive stone “rip-rap” and boulders to more expensive and enormous pre-fabricated concrete or wooden retaining walls. In these new environs, flora is also typically altered from native species to highly-ornamental species, planted either in or adjacent to these retaining walls in order to improve the visual aspect of the more “perfected” landscape, or even as a privacy screen or sound barrier to abutters. For this scope of this project, I photographed the predicable landscape of shopping plazas and nearby roadways with particular interest in retaining walls and other barriers, whether constructed, planted, or both. For most of us, this alteration of land, even if once eye-opening in its unattractiveness soon becomes so commonplace, that its banality is often overlooked. Thus, these landscapes become part of a larger “geography of nowhere”, where our day to day environment is recognized everywhere, simply because it is unique to nowhere. Jen Drociak, 2011