CHIMERICAL LINE

Independent Research // Flower Harvesting Facility // Tumbaco, Ecuador // 2010

Fresh cut flowers are neither a raw natural resource nor a human necessity. Incredibly ephemeral in their physical and aromatic states, these highly engineered blossoms and stems of choice plants are primarily a luxury good. Yet their primal and time honored presence across all cultures has turned flowers into a global enterprise which occupies an extensive and continuously growing surface of productive agricultural land, with a particularly heavy concentration in high altitude equatorial zones, primarily in Ecuador, Colombia, Kenya and Ethiopia.

While significant investments has been made to the basic infrastructures associated with the equatorial flower production chain itself, little or no attention has been placed on the way this industry could be used as a ploy to improve the broader urbanization dynamics of these regions. This applied research and design project investigates the instrumental role the flower industry has played in recasting the territorial dynamics of agricultural land at a global scale along the equator.

Collaboration with Felipe Correa of SOMATIC COLLABORATIVE