How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed?

Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials–fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood–from well-known public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from. Bringing two separate landscapes–the material’s source and the urban site where the material ended up–together, the book explores themes of unequal ecological exchange, labor, and material flows. Reciprocal Landscapes challenges readers to think of materials not as inert products but as continuous with land and the people that shape them, and to imagine construction in solidarity with people, other species, and landscapes elsewhere.

Speaker: Jane Hutton