Visual Communication
DredgeFest Collaborative
Project Goals:
The Dredge Research Collaborative (DRC) investigates human sediment handling practices, through publications, an event series, and various other projects. DredgeFest Louisiana was a three-day symposium field expedition, and speculative design workshop about the human manipulation of sediments, held over seven days in January 2014 in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
Project Team:
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PROJECT LEADERS
- Matthew Seibert
- Shelby Doyle
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PARTNERS + SPONSORS
- LSU Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture
- The Center for Land Use Interpretation
- Gulf Coast Public Lab
- Scenario Journal
Dredgefest featured a symposium to bring together a broad mix of disciplines, corporations, public agencies and organizations in live public conversation, exploring and explaining the past, present, and future of anthropogenic sedimentary manipulation in Louisiana. The DRC also organized a set of fast-paced, intensive, and speculative small-group design workshops on the theme of dredge futurism—future scenarios related to the dredge cycle. The workshops were led by internationally-renowned designers selected for their current innovative work in advancing landscape architectural design methodologies, and asked to turn those methodologies towards the topics of dredge and sediment for four days. The film “The Fluid and the Solid”, a documentary about earth-moving, sediment, and the Anthropocene, was screened at DredgeFest on the floating Tex-Hex Unit in New Orleans’ Industrial Canal. DredgeFest concluded with a guided public tour of landscapes of dredge in the lower Mississippi River Delta, focused on flood control infrastructures and wetland restoration projects.