Eco-Visions in Freshkills Park

On April 17th, 2023, the Eco-Visions in Art and Design class (HA 321) went on a field trip to Freshkills Park, built on the landfill that received New York City waste from 1948 until 2001. As we stepped out of the FIT van, we found ourselves on a strange land—a beautiful landscape built on abject foundations hidden from sight. This site made palpable the accumulation of diverse knowledge we have acquired throughout the course, interfacing the natural and the artificial in art and design, conceiving the environment beyond the human mirror stage. Please read the reflections by one of the students, Lydia Sant. We all came back with slightly different attitudes towards our trash—loving it more than before. Art and everyday life coexist.

–Adjunct Associate Professor Sandra Skurvida, PhD

Freshkills Park: An Earthly Reacquaintance

Lydia Sant, Packaging Design ‘23

What does it mean to meet the place you’ve always lived in? Freshkills Park, a landfill-turned-park in Staten Island, is welcoming New Yorkers to a place that feels both native and new. Freshkills embraces the storied history of the landfill, and to know this is to simply stand in the park. In North Park, an area open to class tours and various creative initiatives, gas pipes stick out of the ground, telling the story of the masses of waste stabilized underneath the grassy knoll. You can see the blue shadows of Manhattan in the distance, and smell the warm sulfur of the Freshkills compost facility. You are standing on what was once a wetland, then an impenetrable landfill, and finally a gentle mound, now home to newly growing Indian grass.

The park relies on highly-engineered ecological systems to restore biodiversity. The ground is a landfill cap—six layers of geotextiles and soil, compounding and equalizing the masses of landfill waste beneath. The indigenous osprey and great egret are returning, symbols of possibility for the park. The most pressing challenge for the team at Freshkills is to communicate with Staten Islanders that this former local burden is now a flourishing ecological haven.

Thus, encountering Freshkills is a reintroduction of sorts. This land contains multitudes; the tension between the jutting pipe in the ground and the smog of the city results in a new, unexplored feeling.

On reframing the way we occupy the earth, cultural theorist Bruno Latour writes in Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, “It would actually be a fairly good definition of ‘modern’ people to say that they live off a land that they don’t inhabit.” Latour explains that society at large today mistakes the world they live from for the world they live in. He suggests we need a new frame to understand the earth on a molecular level, not as a data point or a distant globe, but as a “critical zone.” Latour continues, “Suddenly, modernizers find themselves cantilevered over an abyss: the world they live from irrupts in the midst of the world they live in.” On the North Mound at Freshkills, the juxtaposition of human technology and unbridled earth helps us face our finitude. The element of confrontation between the gas pipe and nature is necessary to tell the story of the landfill: we are standing on the waste that, while aesthetically invisible, still alters the way we experience the park. Freshkills activates Latour's social idea; the North Mound is a space to live from instead of live in