Exhibition Essay

by Mike Curran

It’s strange to find an ancient glacier mentioned in a government document. But buried in the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Environmental Assessment—the final report that authorized the $239 million Interstate 35W expansion—is this offhand note: Soils within the project area are Pleistocene-aged outwash and deposits from the Des Moines lobe.¹ 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 its receded remains each day, I have trouble imagining this land blanketed by an ice sheet. I can hardly remember which exit to take. I cannot remember a time before construction began; I cannot remember when the highway was a neighborhood, was an oak savannah, was a shallow sea.

The soil can.

Early in our own project, Tom sent me 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 formed through daily repetition. “Humans are new to this planet,” he says over his shoulder. “Like children, we break our toys.”²

In France, highways encircle cities almost like protective tissue, never puncturing their centers. The United States took a different tact, plunging routes through dense neighborhoods. In Minneapolis, I-35 was designed to quickly move cars into and out of downtown, swallowing Black- and Latinx-owned homes and businesses and spitting out concrete. Two generations later, the goal remains the same: New express lanes will be established between 26th and 43rd streets. As we merge and gain speed, we should feel more connected than ever.A timelapse of Dutch roadwork went viral. Over two sunrises and sets, a crew in fluorescent coveralls demolishes a roadway, installs a tunnel underneath, and rebuilds a wider road above. These workers are our heroes for the length of the clip; a global community unifies in the comments:

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 and help create conditions for those existing species to flourish. This model produces no waste, recognizing each individual being’s dependence on the next; humans offer light touch, their role more about witnessing than intervening.

In contrast, the Department of Transportation will import 476,000 tons of dirt from midwestern sand and gravel mines to grade the lanes. Meanwhile, other truckloads will remove the arsenic- and copper-contaminated soil identified on site, carrying it off to Burnsville Sanitary Landfill, Shakopee’s Dem-Con Recovery and Recycling, or some other disposal yard located too close to a river.

The Environmental Assessment promises 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. The unspecificity of “elsewhere” is troublesome; an unnamed facility in an unnamed community supposedly possesses the necessary permits. Meanwhile, somewhere in Wisconsin or Illinois or Michigan or some other territory where prehistoric seas deposited sandstone, dredges fracture the bottom of unnamed basins to unearth sediments 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 parallel conclusion, deeming the working class families who lived along I-35’s proposed route unworthy of the land they resided upon—a designation that continues to haunt a city where encampments spring up beside exit ramps. By mid-century, urban renewal—of which highway expansion was a favored tactic—displaced more than a million mostly Black Americans across the country, casting 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

We are not Dutch roadworkers, but Americans are experts of another sort: In moving our waste out of sight. When China stopped importing recyclables in 2018, we sent more ships to Malaysia and Vietnam. We broke open new landfills and small towns from coast to coast shut down recycling programs, sending their plastics to incinerators instead.

Tom’s garden moves at a different speed. He arranges bouquets out of worn pallets, cracked concrete, and sandbags that could have fallen from one of thousands of dump trucks. Borrowing 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—his installation resembles a construction site that will never be completed.

Entering this space stuck between excavation and deposition, we recognize the building blocks of our slapdash society with startling specificity; the names of transplanted species—Verbascum thapsus, Cirsium arvense—call to mind estranged neighbors. This is our excess, these are our broken toys, and here’s the life that grows despite everything we have done to stifle it.
David Godshall of the landscape design studio TERREMOTO wrote that, “Every civilization has its own personal and idiosyncratic relationship with wilderness.”³ He considers “garden-making” a window into 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, avoiding 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, Texas, the route slashes through other cities severed by highways—Kansas City, Fort Worth, San Antonio—and crisscrosses the corn belt before spilling out atop 1.4 billion-year-old granite in 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 pops 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 another layer of sediment, pushing our debris into plain view. The question remains of what will be remembered after the garden is deinstalled, its materials placed elsewhere.

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Endnotes

1. Minnesota Department of Transportation. Environmental Assessment: Interstate 35W and Lake Street Improvement Project. St. Paul, Minnesota: 2016.︎︎︎

2. Comte, Oliver, director. 2013. Le Jardin en Mouvement. A.P.R.E.S.

3. Godshall, David. “Wilderness and Garden-Making, Post-Internet,” The Planthunter 46. 2017.︎︎︎

^{Photographs by Bade Turgut.}