Mike R. Curran
Thirty Five Dubya
Tom Bierlein
07/2021Tom Bierlein︎︎︎ is a sculptor and gardener who creates spaces for people to engage with the environment they're situated within. In Thirty Five Dubya, he builds a temporary garden out of displaced plants and the rubble left behind by the ongoing Interstate 35 expansion project in Minneapolis.
Installation images by Bade Turgut.
Curatorial Essay
It’s strange to find an ancient glacier mentioned in a government document. But buried deep in the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Environmental Assessment—the final report that authorized the $239 million Interstate 35W expansion project—is this offhand note: Soils within the project area are Pleistocene-aged outwash and terrace deposits from the Grantsburg sublobe of the Des Moines lobe. In glacial-speak, a lobe is a projection that extends off an ice sheet, trailing the mass like a swollen tongue, leaving small hills and great lakes in its wake.
Though I walk atop these receded remains each day, I have trouble imagining this land blanketed by an ice sheet. I am an outsider to this place, and can hardly remember which exit to take. I cannot remember a time before construction began; I cannot remember when the highway was rubble, was a neighborhood, was an oak savannah, was a shallow sea.
The soil can.
Early in our own project, Tom sent me a link to Le jardin en mouvement, a dreamy documentary that follows French gardener Gilles Clément through the landscapes he tends to. In a weathered red rainjacket and wide-brimmed hat, he traces a footpath he has formed in the earth through daily repetition. “Humans are new to this planet,” he says over his shoulder. “Like children, we break our toys.”
In France, highways encircle cities almost like protective tissue, rarely puncturing their centers. The United States took a different tact, plunging routes directly through dense neighborhoods. In Minneapolis, I-35 was designed to move vehicles into and out of downtown as quickly as possible, swallowing Black- and Latinx-owned homes and businesses and spitting out concrete. Two generations later, the goal remains the same: New express lanes will soon be established between 26th and 43rd streets. We are told that, as we merge into these lanes and gain speed, we will feel more connected than ever.
A timelapse video of Dutch roadwork went viral. A crew in fluorescent coveralls demolishes a roadway, installs a tunnel underneath, and rebuilds a wider road above, all over the course of two sunrises and sets. These workers are our new heroes for the length of the clip; a global community unifies in the comments section:
“48 hours in the Netherlands ...... 10 years in Romania”
“One weeken in Netherlands 33years in saudi arabia”
“In italia ci vogliono 6 mesi se va bene...”
A commenter with a bald eagle icon insists that, like the moon landing, the video is a hoax.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources found no occurrences of rare plant or animal species, native plant communities, or other significant natural features within an approximate one-mile radius of the I-35W project area.
Clément’s approach to gardening is simple: Observe what’s already present in the landscape, and help create the conditions for those existing species to flourish. This model produces no waste, recognizing each individual being as essential to the next; humans offer light touch, their role more about witnessing than intervening.
In contrast, the Department of Transportation’s plan requires extensive earthwork. 476,000 tons of fill dirt will be imported from midwestern sand and gravel mines to grade the new lanes. Meanwhile, other truckloads will remove the arsenic- and copper-contaminated soil identified on site, carrying it off to Burnsville Sanitary Landfill, or Dem-Con Recovery and Recycling in Shakopee, or some other disposal yard located too close to a river.
The Environmental Assessment assures us that the correct remediation steps will be taken: All regulated solid wastes generated by construction of the proposed project will be disposed of properly in a permitted, licensed solid waste facility or a similarly regulated facility elsewhere. With a cascade of materials pouring out in all directions, the unspecificity of “elsewhere” is troublesome; an unnamed facility in an unnamed community supposedly possesses the necessary permits. Meanwhile, somewhere in Minnesota or Wisconsin or Illinois or Michigan or some other territory where prehistoric seas deposited sandstone, heavy dredges mounted to barges are fracturing the bottom of unnamed waterways to bring up material that will only become interred again, this time by asphalt.
At some point, those mining and dumping facilities underwent a similar assessment to the I-35 project, whereby some agency determined that the terrain where these materials are derived and discarded held little ecological value. In 1963, the Minneapolis Planning Department drew a similar conclusion, deeming the hundreds of working class families who lived along I-35’s proposed route unworthy of the land they resided upon—a designation that continues to haunt the city, where encampments spring up beside exit ramps. By mid-century the forces of urban renewal—of which highway expansion was a preferred tactic—had displaced more than a million mostly Black Americans across the country, casting off entire communities to drift elsewhere, through a nation long reduced to inputs and outputs.
Suggested for you:
what happens to our recycling in the us
what happens to the garbage in the ocean
what happens to your 401k when you quit
what happens to our atoms when we die
Though we are not Dutch roadworkers, Americans are experts of another sort: In moving our waste out of sight. When China banned the import of most recyclables in 2018, we changed course and sent more ships to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam. We broke ground on new landfills, and small towns from coast to coast shut down recycling programs, sending their plastics to incinerators instead.
Tom’s garden is also in motion, but at a different speed. With worn pallets, reclaimed concrete, and sandbags, he arranges abundant bouquets out of materials that could have fallen from one of thousands of dump trucks. His sculptures borrow the language of temporary structures scattered alongside the highway—the slapdash scaffolding, exposed propping systems, and portable footbridges that allow workers to traverse the project area. Consequently, the exhibition resembles a construction site that will never be completed.
Entering this transient space stuck between excavation and deposition, we are made to recognize the building blocks of our slapdash society with startling specificity; the names of Tom’s selected plants—Verbascum thapsus, Cirsium arvense—call to mind estranged neighbors. This is our waste, our excess; these are our broken toys. And here’s the life that grows despite everything we have done to stifle it.
David Godshall, the co-founder of the landscape design studio TERREMOTO, wrote that, “Every civilization has its own personal and idiosyncratic relationship with wilderness.” He points to “garden-making” as a window into understanding a culture’s attitudes towards nature. For instance, 17th century French designs “reduced [wilderness] to clipped hedges” to emphasize the monarchy’s “god-given prowess.” At the other end of the spectrum, many of the various traditional forms of Japanese garden-making emphasize connectivity with nature, and thus avoid unnecessary ornamentation.
Following this line, Tom’s garden befits this time and place, for what’s more American than I-35? Stretching from Duluth to Laredo, the route slashes through other cities severed by highways—Kansas City, Fort Worth, San Antonio—and crisscrosses the fertile soils of the corn belt before spilling out atop 1.4 billion year old granite when it reaches Oklahoma’s Arbuckle Mountains. Its contours are the stuff of country music ballads (I’ve been everywhere, man).
If you plug the 1,577 mile route into Google Maps, a trail of yellow warning icons pop up, each picturing a featureless figure shoveling what must be a pile of dirt. A crew moves earth at every juncture, carving new stratums out of displaced soil. Tom has exposed a new layer of sediment, bringing our debris into plain view. The question remains of what will be remembered of the garden after it’s deinstalled, its materials placed elsewhere.
Though I walk atop these receded remains each day, I have trouble imagining this land blanketed by an ice sheet. I am an outsider to this place, and can hardly remember which exit to take. I cannot remember a time before construction began; I cannot remember when the highway was rubble, was a neighborhood, was an oak savannah, was a shallow sea.
The soil can.
︎
Early in our own project, Tom sent me a link to Le jardin en mouvement, a dreamy documentary that follows French gardener Gilles Clément through the landscapes he tends to. In a weathered red rainjacket and wide-brimmed hat, he traces a footpath he has formed in the earth through daily repetition. “Humans are new to this planet,” he says over his shoulder. “Like children, we break our toys.”
In France, highways encircle cities almost like protective tissue, rarely puncturing their centers. The United States took a different tact, plunging routes directly through dense neighborhoods. In Minneapolis, I-35 was designed to move vehicles into and out of downtown as quickly as possible, swallowing Black- and Latinx-owned homes and businesses and spitting out concrete. Two generations later, the goal remains the same: New express lanes will soon be established between 26th and 43rd streets. We are told that, as we merge into these lanes and gain speed, we will feel more connected than ever.
︎
A timelapse video of Dutch roadwork went viral. A crew in fluorescent coveralls demolishes a roadway, installs a tunnel underneath, and rebuilds a wider road above, all over the course of two sunrises and sets. These workers are our new heroes for the length of the clip; a global community unifies in the comments section:
“48 hours in the Netherlands ...... 10 years in Romania”
“One weeken in Netherlands 33years in saudi arabia”
“In italia ci vogliono 6 mesi se va bene...”
A commenter with a bald eagle icon insists that, like the moon landing, the video is a hoax.
︎
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources found no occurrences of rare plant or animal species, native plant communities, or other significant natural features within an approximate one-mile radius of the I-35W project area.
︎
Clément’s approach to gardening is simple: Observe what’s already present in the landscape, and help create the conditions for those existing species to flourish. This model produces no waste, recognizing each individual being as essential to the next; humans offer light touch, their role more about witnessing than intervening.
In contrast, the Department of Transportation’s plan requires extensive earthwork. 476,000 tons of fill dirt will be imported from midwestern sand and gravel mines to grade the new lanes. Meanwhile, other truckloads will remove the arsenic- and copper-contaminated soil identified on site, carrying it off to Burnsville Sanitary Landfill, or Dem-Con Recovery and Recycling in Shakopee, or some other disposal yard located too close to a river.
The Environmental Assessment assures us that the correct remediation steps will be taken: All regulated solid wastes generated by construction of the proposed project will be disposed of properly in a permitted, licensed solid waste facility or a similarly regulated facility elsewhere. With a cascade of materials pouring out in all directions, the unspecificity of “elsewhere” is troublesome; an unnamed facility in an unnamed community supposedly possesses the necessary permits. Meanwhile, somewhere in Minnesota or Wisconsin or Illinois or Michigan or some other territory where prehistoric seas deposited sandstone, heavy dredges mounted to barges are fracturing the bottom of unnamed waterways to bring up material that will only become interred again, this time by asphalt.
At some point, those mining and dumping facilities underwent a similar assessment to the I-35 project, whereby some agency determined that the terrain where these materials are derived and discarded held little ecological value. In 1963, the Minneapolis Planning Department drew a similar conclusion, deeming the hundreds of working class families who lived along I-35’s proposed route unworthy of the land they resided upon—a designation that continues to haunt the city, where encampments spring up beside exit ramps. By mid-century the forces of urban renewal—of which highway expansion was a preferred tactic—had displaced more than a million mostly Black Americans across the country, casting off entire communities to drift elsewhere, through a nation long reduced to inputs and outputs.
︎
Suggested for you:
what happens to our recycling in the us
what happens to the garbage in the ocean
what happens to your 401k when you quit
what happens to our atoms when we die
︎
Though we are not Dutch roadworkers, Americans are experts of another sort: In moving our waste out of sight. When China banned the import of most recyclables in 2018, we changed course and sent more ships to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam. We broke ground on new landfills, and small towns from coast to coast shut down recycling programs, sending their plastics to incinerators instead.
Tom’s garden is also in motion, but at a different speed. With worn pallets, reclaimed concrete, and sandbags, he arranges abundant bouquets out of materials that could have fallen from one of thousands of dump trucks. His sculptures borrow the language of temporary structures scattered alongside the highway—the slapdash scaffolding, exposed propping systems, and portable footbridges that allow workers to traverse the project area. Consequently, the exhibition resembles a construction site that will never be completed.
Entering this transient space stuck between excavation and deposition, we are made to recognize the building blocks of our slapdash society with startling specificity; the names of Tom’s selected plants—Verbascum thapsus, Cirsium arvense—call to mind estranged neighbors. This is our waste, our excess; these are our broken toys. And here’s the life that grows despite everything we have done to stifle it.
︎
David Godshall, the co-founder of the landscape design studio TERREMOTO, wrote that, “Every civilization has its own personal and idiosyncratic relationship with wilderness.” He points to “garden-making” as a window into understanding a culture’s attitudes towards nature. For instance, 17th century French designs “reduced [wilderness] to clipped hedges” to emphasize the monarchy’s “god-given prowess.” At the other end of the spectrum, many of the various traditional forms of Japanese garden-making emphasize connectivity with nature, and thus avoid unnecessary ornamentation.
Following this line, Tom’s garden befits this time and place, for what’s more American than I-35? Stretching from Duluth to Laredo, the route slashes through other cities severed by highways—Kansas City, Fort Worth, San Antonio—and crisscrosses the fertile soils of the corn belt before spilling out atop 1.4 billion year old granite when it reaches Oklahoma’s Arbuckle Mountains. Its contours are the stuff of country music ballads (I’ve been everywhere, man).
If you plug the 1,577 mile route into Google Maps, a trail of yellow warning icons pop up, each picturing a featureless figure shoveling what must be a pile of dirt. A crew moves earth at every juncture, carving new stratums out of displaced soil. Tom has exposed a new layer of sediment, bringing our debris into plain view. The question remains of what will be remembered of the garden after it’s deinstalled, its materials placed elsewhere.