Deep Peak 

The prompt for the competition was to redesign the world’s most iconic park, Central Park, after its destruction by eco-terrorists. I worked with Panomisco Collective of Mexico CIty to create a simple cut and fill landscape that opened up four spheres of questioning, all with aim of de-anthropocizing and decolonizing the urban park.

Stars, cities, molecules. A sunrise, construction sounds, spores spreading. Our world consists of beings and entities existing at radically different scales of time and space, all gathering together into this one time we call now and this one space we call here. In this gathering, different modalities of being, different ways of sensing the world, encounter each other.

Deep Peak is a cut and fill landscape: Manhattan bedrock is overturned to construct a mountain, exposing the geological substrata on which New York City and its predecessors have grown. Groundwater, pushed up by rising sea levels, seeps into the gap and forms a liquid body. Lake and mountain mirror each other: a global water level index and an inverted archaeological index. What was once deepest underground, now stands highest.

The destabilized ground opens four spheres of dialogue, activating  elemental ways of relating to the world: the atmosphere for our increasingly polluted skies and the distant stars; the hydrosphere for the rapid rise of our sea levels; the geosphere, for immersion in the chthonic darkness that is the counterpart to
daylight; and the agnostosphere, a zone where humans cannot enter, for the unknown and unknowable.

Playfully untouched by humans, the winds blow and swirl around the mountain; its currents descend into the cave. There, in the soft, shadowy silence, faraway from the always-lit city machine, a pool of water waits for the winter solstice sun, surrounded by fungi and bacteria, ferns and mosses, and all the photophobic creatures that grow in the moist shadows. Human, plastic bag, virus. Deep Peak manifests that we do not stand alone but in the presence of beings andentities existing at radically different scales of time and space.