Grounds of Care

Abstract

In a culture of replacement, this thesis looks at fractured fragments – within our bodies, buildings and landscapes, in an attempt to reframe the agency of repair across an entanglement of temporalities. Along the Carpathian Mountains of post-communist Romania, non-human agents in various states and tempos - geologic, liquid, muddy, sublime - mobilized a medical, scientific and political apparatus for grounds of care. Once a bustling spa town with a small power plant thriving on the soft extraction of ground minerals and waters, Govora’s healing landscapes now sit abandoned, prey to commercial redevelopment. Through a petrographic framework, a writing through rocks, this thesis attempts to reveal and mediate understandings of what is below ground and render the ghostly figures of what was above. It frames a story about the passing of time in the recovery of bodies, organic and inorganic, within a post-industrial landscape, questioning the ‘groundedness’ of any intervention which might lie in it – specifically, through acts of burial, insertion, assimilation and detachment. From ground to water to the body, this thesis attempts to articulate minerals as simultaneously medium, agents and loci for care, challenging the modernist model of smoothness and mechanization. Grasping the dissipative nature of our bodies and buildings, it aims to reimagine architecture as an entropic flow of materials – connected to the ground and the people who experience it.