Winner of the 2024 WLA Student Awards – Award of Excellence in the Concept – Large Design category
Named in honor of Katryn Yusoff’s seminal work, Insurgent Geology is a two-fold curatorial and design project. First, it is a traveling exhibit initially inaugurated at the Living Museum of the Earth in NYC the 10th of May 2051. Secondly, it’s an 800 miles-long pilgrimage through the former extractive landscapes of Alaska, imagined and designed by a team of landscape architects in collaboration with Gaïa-ologists, museum curators and the Alaskan People. The initial project aimed to unearth evidence of past land trauma in the Arctic and to speculate through design on new mineral knowledge systems in the post-oil era of Alaska.
The project explores the intersections between geological processes and social justice, emphasizing the active role of geology in political and social struggles. Delivered in the early 2050s, the design interventions punctuating the pilgrimage (STOPS) are located along the former Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). Conceived as a continuation of the traveling exhibit, the different sites have been designed for an embodied and sensory experience of the former extractive landscapes and oil-infrastructures of Alaska. Visitors “follow the carbon”, from the outlet of the pipeline in Valdez town back to the northern Arctic plain where the oil and gas were initially extracted.
Inspired by Jane Hutton’s concept of “reciprocal landscapes” and in clear lineage with land artist Robert Smithson’s work, both “Site(s)” in Alaska (the pilgrimage) and” Non-Site” (the exhibition at the Museum) are connected, reciprocal. One is the actual and tangible site(s) of extraction and land-trauma along the “oil spine” of Alaska, the former being the reciprocal institution of geological knowledge formation and diffusion. By re-connecting both site(s) and non-site, Insurgent Geology counter-acts the “deterritorialization of geology”, understood by Jussi Parikka as a process in which geological materials and processes are no longer confined to their original contexts but become integrated into human technological, economic, and cultural systems somewhere else.
The pilgrimage begins at the old Valdez Marine Terminal, the historical endpoint of the pipeline. Now a mineral park under decontamination, the site showcases the toxic legacy of Alaska’s oil industry and the evolving interaction between local materials, contaminated soils, and plants.
Continuing north, visitors reach the site of the “Great Explosion of 2042,” where militant ecologists, frustrated by government inaction, blew up sections of the pipeline in protest. This memorial, crafted from pipeline remnants and centered around the explosion’s crater, symbolizes resistance and geo-social transformation.
The third stop, in the Brooks Range, highlights the Shublik geological formation, the primary source rock for the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. As glaciers melt and rivers shift, the path through this sacred site co-evolves with the stream, reflecting the dynamic relationship between fluvial geology, climate change and human infrastructure. Once crucial for the oil industry, the outcrop now holds sacred significance, embodying a new mineral kinship and deep-time connection in Alaska’s post-oil era.
The journey concludes at the former oil platforms of Prudhoe Bay, where shifting Arctic ecologies evoke new mineral kinships, inspiring reimagined relationships between humans and the Earth in the Anthropocene.
Insurgent Geology
Student: Mélanie Louterbach
University: Harvard Graduate School of Design
Advisor: Rose Monacella, Harvard Graduate School of Design
