Dauphin Island is located on a sand bar. The Gulf of Mexico lies to the south of the island, and the Mississippi Sound and the bay of Mobile lie to the north. The island currently has a fixed population of 1200 inhabitants and is connected to Mobile by the hyperboloid Gordon Persons bridge – in an almost dreamed-of suspension. Even though it has several bird reserves, the main one is the Audubon Bird Sanctuary; it is the primary meeting place for the birds that emigrate to the north from South America and, as a consequence, many species can be found before they continue their journeys.
From the island’s original name of Massacre, to so many named fatalities: Katrina, Ivan….up to the current oil-spill catastrophe and the over 1.9 million gallons of chemical dispersants poured in to date to dissolve the crude oil that began spreading on 20th April, in what is seen as the worst spill in history, this island has a natural complicity with adversity.
How can this island settle or face this conjunction of disaster and its subordination to the subsoil with the property policy of its meagre surface? The inhabitants of Dauphin Island have a motto: rise up in the face of adversity, but, doesn’t this proclamation contain a neurotic obstinacy in what is a supra-heroic, but useless existence? Their denial of docility generates a permanent constructive worship, an establishment of the bricoleur
Contrary to this global flow (peremnal) architectural activity on Dauphin Island is not so much purposeful as substitutive. And in turn it does not seek to avoid its collapse using predetermined customs of containment and paralysis. That is to say, it does not use more decisive anchoring methods, or materials that offer more sail-type resistance to the wind. In principle this may seem to be a mistake, a voluntary outlawing, a banishment, in short, to that natural state of resignation. But the fact is that there is an identitary conformation and a constructive reflection anchored in the south of the country with settlements that are not permanent but are simultaneous, that is, as swift as the immediate occurrence of their demolition or collapse.
My goal, in this series of images, is to carry out project work, a sum of interventions, of alterations to space, based on pre-existing “cartography” but paying attention to the want of proportion bequeathed by the territory itself, and almost to a certain suprarealism, a certain exaggeration and based on respectful usage of said territory. Locating, for this purpose, small buildings or buildings on a scale that is symmetrical to the context, and executing them on those voids on the beach where vestiges indicate a prior presence.
The idea is also to restore and accentuate the phantasmagoria inherent in the area, but using energy-efficient buildings, with recycled materials or materials with low energy expenditure, buildings which are in turn a nature observatory.
