Chemical Occupations
Anti-Colonial Reactions in the DesertHarvard University Graduate School of Design
Thesis Prize in Landscape Architecture
ASLA Award of Honor
Advised by Rosalea Monacella
Abstract
“Chemical Occupations” examines how landscape architects can disassemble traditional ecological principles of growth, succession, and restoration to reconfigure landscape through chemical agency. It positions toxic landscapes, not merely as disturbed sites awaiting an idyllic fix, but rather as uncontained, reactive, and existing through multiple states of matter.
In Fayoum, an oasis in the Sahara Desert, layers of occupation have toxified the landscape far beyond the presence of its original colonial agents. Here, ecology is co-opted as the final act of the colonial “exquisite corpse,” as a device to delineate and falsely restore through the foreign typology of the national park. Sets of chemical chromatograms, prioritized over Cartesian ecological tools, serve as a methodology to unveil, dissolve, and reconfigure the toxic residues of the former park. “Chemical Occupations” advances the “anti-park,” myths of reactive sovereignty, actualized through new rituals, markers, and stewardship practices, whereby Fayoumis reclaim toxicity toward new futures.
Acknowledgements
I begin this project by acknowledging the land of Fayoum – an ancient oasis and people cradled in the Sahara Desert. I offer my gratitude to its people – many of whom are family members and many whom are not – for sharing their stories, myths, and blessings with me – I offer my deepest gratitude. Their wisdom, grief, and resilience shaped this thesis in ways no design may ever contain. This thesis does not seek to restore or idealise; instead, it listens and speculates. The narratives told here are speculative fictions rooted in empirical fragments, and so I offer this in dialogue with their remembrance, memories, and futures.
Under the precarious absence of occupation, they devised a new method to measure their landscape, not infrastructural or ecological, but a method used by chemists called chromatography. They traced the bounds of the exquisite corpse of the park, collecting samples of plants. For each plant: they crushed it into a paste and made a liquid dye of it. Placing one drop on the base of a piece of paper, they wet the paper with alcohol. After a few minutes, the dye dissolved and separated across the paper. The marks unveiled the faintest chemical traces of their occupiers, and the residues of their contamination. In Fayoum, coloniality has an afterlife.
This thesis does not seek resolution but rather affirms an unfolding – a continuation of the care, resilience, and testimonies that shape the land of Fayoum; whereby myth acts as a portal towards cosmological sovereignty. This project stands in solidarity with the right of Fayoumis to inhabit the land on their own terms, to reclaim and craft their own futures in the absence of occupation - chemical, colonial, or militaristic. This is not a conclusion, but a gesture towards self-determination, towards dreaming otherwise in a world where the desert refuses itself from those who call it empty.
Fayoum is an ancient oasis connected to the Nile River in the Sahara Desert of Egypt. My grandmother, who is Fayoumi herself, would tell us about a parable of Fayoum to warn us of greed. That once, the richest man on Earth lived in Fayoum. He believed that he was so powerful, that he could challenge God, and so God punished him by opening up the desert, swallowing up all of his riches, defining the depression of Fayoum, forcing him to wander the desert alone.
I bring up my grandmother’s parable not to be sentimental, but to emphasise that myth is the only way to read the matter of Fayoum. There is another, somewhat more famous myth, which explains the origins of Fayoum, as the landscape we see today. In 1600 BC, it is told that the Prophet Yusuf had a dream. In his dream, Yusuf sees 7 unhealthy cows devouring 7 healthy cows, he warns the Pharoah that in 7 years time, Egypt will face a famine.
In trusting Yusuf, the Pharoah orders a canal be built, an extension of the Nile into the desert to create an oasis as a food reserve. In his namesake, the Bahr Yusuf canal is constructed, the desert is occupied and Fayoum is formed. But the dreams of expansion were not just for the Pharoah’s ears, soon others came, the French, the British, and then the army, who came measure, draw, and render Fayoum into object of their dreams.
They traced the land, discovering where was most productive…
…first, they drew thin lines which imprinted their dreams onto the desert…
…Then, they drew points as dams which blocked the Nile sediment…
…then thickerlines which concretized the canal and its new branches, spilling chemicals for cotton to grow…
Lines upon lines, they drew, manipulating the land with new industries, new toxicants which halted Fayoum’s seasons, until the land was no longer measured by its blessings, but by its yield for Empire.
Then army came with their own ecologists, who drew a polygon in the desert, fencing it, rendering it empty, and calling it a park, the Wadi Rayan National Park, established in 1989 – the final act of the exquisite corpse of colonial containment. Equipped with rational science, they told the Fayoumis that the park would help restore their landscape which had been toxified over the years, but they knew this foreign typology was just a tool to control the Fayoumis.
Fayoum is an ancient oasis connected to the Nile River in the Sahara Desert of Egypt. My grandmother, who is Fayoumi herself, would tell us about a parable of Fayoum to warn us of greed. That once, the richest man on Earth lived in Fayoum. He believed that he was so powerful, that he could challenge God, and so God punished him by opening up the desert, swallowing up all of his riches, defining the depression of Fayoum, forcing him to wander the desert alone.
I bring up my grandmother’s parable not to be sentimental, but to emphasise that myth is the only way to read the matter of Fayoum. There is another, somewhat more famous myth, which explains the origins of Fayoum, as the landscape we see today. In 1600 BC, it is told that the Prophet Yusuf had a dream. In his dream, Yusuf sees 7 unhealthy cows devouring 7 healthy cows, he warns the Pharoah that in 7 years time, Egypt will face a famine.
In trusting Yusuf, the Pharoah orders a canal be built, an extension of the Nile into the desert to create an oasis as a food reserve. In his namesake, the Bahr Yusuf canal is constructed, the desert is occupied and Fayoum is formed. But the dreams of expansion were not just for the Pharoah’s ears, soon others came, the French, the British, and then the army, who came measure, draw, and render Fayoum into object of their dreams.
They traced the land, discovering where was most productive…
…first, they drew thin lines which imprinted their dreams onto the desert…
…Then, they drew points as dams which blocked the Nile sediment…
…then thickerlines which concretized the canal and its new branches, spilling chemicals for cotton to grow…
Lines upon lines, they drew, manipulating the land with new industries, new toxicants which halted Fayoum’s seasons, until the land was no longer measured by its blessings, but by its yield for Empire.
Then army came with their own ecologists, who drew a polygon in the desert, fencing it, rendering it empty, and calling it a park, the Wadi Rayan National Park, established in 1989 – the final act of the exquisite corpse of colonial containment. Equipped with rational science, they told the Fayoumis that the park would help restore their landscape which had been toxified over the years, but they knew this foreign typology was just a tool to control the Fayoumis.
Fayoum is an ancient oasis connected to the Nile River in the Sahara Desert of Egypt. My grandmother, who is Fayoumi herself, would tell us about a parable of Fayoum to warn us of greed. That once, the richest man on Earth lived in Fayoum. He believed that he was so powerful, that he could challenge God, and so God punished him by opening up the desert, swallowing up all of his riches, defining the depression of Fayoum, forcing him to wander the desert alone.
In 1600 BC, it is told that the Prophet Yusuf had a dream. In his dream, Yusuf sees 7 unhealthy cows devouring 7 healthy cows, he warns the Pharoah that in 7 years time, Egypt will face a famine. In trusting Yusuf, the Pharoah orders a canal be built, an extension of the Nile into the desert to create an oasis as a food reserve. In his namesake, the Bahr Yusuf canal is constructed, the desert is occupied and Fayoum is formed. But the dreams of expansion were not just for the Pharoah’s ears, soon others came, the French, the British, and then the army, who came measure, draw, and render Fayoum into object of their dreams.
They traced the land, discovering where was most productive…first, they drew thin lines which imprinted their dreams onto the desert...then, they drew points as dams which blocked the Nile sediment…then thicker lines which concretized the canal and its new branches, spilling chemicals for cotton to grow…
Lines upon lines, they drew, manipulating the land with new industries, new toxicants which halted Fayoum’s seasons, until the land was no longer measured by its blessings, but by its yield for Empire. Then army came with their own ecologists, who drew a polygon in the desert, fencing it, rendering it empty, and calling it a park, the Wadi Rayan National Park, established in 1989 – the final act of the exquisite corpse of colonial containment. Equipped with rational science, they told the Fayoumis that the park would help restore their landscape which had been toxified over the years, but they knew this foreign typology was just a tool to control the Fayoumis.