Our field study occurred on lands of the Pueblo people—the true stewards of this place. I was/am a guest.
I keep thinking about the drinking-water facility beside the Rio Grande,
“built to resemble a Spanish mission church to better blend in with its surroundings.” I stood beside it, hearing and feeling its industrial hum; it sounded like no church I’ve ever been to.
The past few months have been an awakening to the pipes and wires and tracks that uphold my life. I’ve been following lines and flows, realizing I walk by a natural gas pipe there, drive by a generating station here.
Why didn’t I see the infrastructure that supports me? Why is a pump station masked as a church? Are we ashamed of the cost of our living? What would it mean to create infrastructure meant to be seen? Something to be celebrated? Something not weighed down by costs we wish to forget?
Fences or distance, innocuous facade or duplicitous facade—all ways we keep infrastructure at bay. But it’s easy to witness effect.
I’m interested in where control lapses—where humans are reminded other forces and life have a say.
It’s like trying to hold a feather still in the wind.
For now, I’m working on seeing what I’ve been blind to.
I keep returning to these displaced trees, now standing as transmission poles.
I keep thinking of the years they collected and hardened sunlight, inch by inch. A height aimed at reaching light above a canopy. That height now holds wires, carrying energy at the speed of light.
So I can scroll.
