land (reciprocity and other methods of defining the) fill

Abstract

Tomkins Cove Quarry is a marginal site expressing a central contradiction: once a bustling open pit quarry that supplied crushed limestone for construction in New York City, it is now abandoned and slowly filling with water while rusting conveyor lines stretch to a Hudson River they no longer supply. Absurdly, the current plan by Tilcon New York Inc. to fill the quarry with demolition waste from the city and cap it with “nature” underscores the standard practice of erasure of such zones of otherness, ultimately seeking to sanitize a wasted landscape and recycle it into salable land.

Through a semantic approach, this thesis sets out to deconstruct and examine the relationship between the "land" and the "fill," specifically between the quarry and the waste as symptoms of culture and symbols of labor and extraction. This thesis asks: are there other ways to facilitate the flow of matter and simultaneously the sustenance of abused landscapes? Moreover, how can we resist relegating waste to the margins and instead foster a practice of centering it as an invaluable resource that recycles the dominant and spatial order? Lastly, is it possible to untangle the politics of waste and its designated sites and think of materials not as inert products but as continuous with land and the people that shape them?