Breeding Resilience: Thriving in Orange Air

M. Arch (2020)

Individual Work

The annual peatland fires in Central Kalimantan has transformed the invisible, formless, life-giving element air into haze that corrupts and threatens the very breath that supports life. At PSI levels of 2900, the air turns orange due to Rayleigh scattering. Site visit revealed that while city dwellers were privileged to have Oxygen Houses and Mobile Oxygen Vans for oxygen treatment, villagers were forced to innovate their own survival mechanisms through the creation of breathing aids made of plastic bottles, aquarium pumps and face masks.

The proposal argues for "adhoc" and "village engineering" as a much more adaptive and effective mechanism in dealing with the hyperobject haze, as compared to anthropocentrically-scaled, heroic constructs of science, economics and politics that merely distance the issue at hand. The critical environmental conditions call for the return of animistic beliefs and rituals of the indigenous, as structures are molded from local materials to support breathing and rewet fire-prone lands. As the structures morph and transform mechanically foregrounded against the orange-gradient, the distinction between man, animal and village engineering structures are blurred, as survival mechanisms are activated in response to the fire and heat that is at hand, forming an aesthetic of resilience and adaptation.