More clean livin'

View more images here of the projects completed as part of our collaboration with SIMPARCH. Thanks to Matt Lynch and Steve Badgett for sharing their photos.

Daily livin'

Our first “official” collaborative projects began this week working with Simparch at Clean Livin’ on the South Base of CLUI. Matt and Steve (the duo behind Simparch and Clean Livin’) presented our group with some general ideas of projects that they wanted to see realized on the compound, which we used as a starting point for a collective brainstorming session.

We soon found ourselves with a long list of ideas, from technical improvements to their various composting and water systems to strategies that would keep their Target Museum guano free, while allowing the bats to maintain their habitats there.

Eventually we whittled down the list to four do-able projects based on our available work time and individuals’ interests: redesigning the grey water system, designing and building a solar oven, building a portable shade structure and digging a hole for their new 550 gallon water tank. We broke into three groups, each heading a different project, and all agreeing to put in time with the hole.

As my team gathered and started creating a design for the shade structure, I realized that I was a little rusty with my collaboration skills. As a graduate student whose time is mainly spent on solo work, working with four other artists (all highly creative and with varied points of view) in a limited time frame and with mostly found materials, presented a new set of challenges beyond the actual execution of the project. However, being able to work with Matt and Steve, a great example of what successful collaboration looks like, I like to think that, as a team, we managed the ups and downs of collaboration throughout the week as well as we could. For myself, I know that what I took away from this week extended beyond how compost water systems work and how to countersink a screw. (Although, it was exciting to learn these things.) I leave CLUI this week with a new understanding of what collaboration looks like: flexibility, an open mind, skill sharing, surrender and perhaps most importantly, a respect for each other and our ideas. - Elena Lopez

Ryan, Melodie, Jen, Elena and Matt tackling the portable shade structure, or tetra-tipi.

Test drive.

Celeste and Eugene cutting pieces for the hexa solar cooker

Jane and Jami figuring out the best way to redirect the gray water and make the system more user-friendly

Reflective-tape arrows indicating direction of flow

Jane and Nina working on the grey water feature

Grey water cascading into mulch/garden bed

Nina and Jenn installing a tension line to support grey water

irrigation line from the tower to the compost pile.

Jenn and Jami's grey water compost soaker.

Utopian Architecture thread

This first part of our semester is focussed around an exploration of the particular, or peculiar brand of utopian architecture and settlements that have developed here in the Southwest. Though we have done some reading on the subject before leaving, there has been no formal discussion on the subject, and it is interesting to try and pinpoint when and where our investigations have begun - to locate the thread of that conversation within our journey so far. Perhaps it was at the Spiral Jetty, in the act of banding together and deploying the cook/technology tent up for the first time - extracting the carefully packed poles, tarps, tables, stoves, cookware, solar panels, laptops, etc. - and beginning to inhabit the modular home-base that will provide a comfortable living and working space throughout the course of our itinerant journey.

Or maybe it began at the Sun Tunnels where we immediately colonized the art because it invited us to do so, and spent the day inhabiting the cylinders in numerous creative ways. The surrounding landscape burst into sublime displays of color and light at dawn and dusk, but for most of the day it is oppressively bright and hot here. The tunnels are surprisingly hospitable spaces in a not so hospitable place - cool, shaded and curved in a way that cradles the body. The fact that there are four of them and some distance between them allows a certain welcome sense of privacy and retreat, but mostly the site prompted a flurry of collective projects. The group was primed for this experience - we’ve been getting along rather well so far, and it seems that the tunnels just channeled that sense of communality and allowed it to manifest itself in more concrete ways. Their scale is human, welcoming, protective, open and they all point towards a central plaza-like area.

In that one day, the tunnels alternately served as napping quarters, reading room,yoga studio, movie set, workspace and concert hall. At night, after an etherial Tibetan bowl concert performed by Melodie, we laid out our sleeping bags and mats inside the concrete tubes and went to sleep - sheltered from the howling winds but able to gaze up at the densely starred sky, beautifully framed by the concrete oculi.

After the Sun Tunnels, we headed for Wendover where we have been staying at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) Residency Support Unit, which is located on a semi-abandoned airforce base. There is much to be said about the military history of Wendover, it’s proximity to the Boneville Salt Flats, to the Great Salt Lake and to nuclear testing and radioactive waste sites - more than can be adequately adressed here. In a nutshell, as Matt Coolidge, CLUI director shared with us today, the Wendover residency provides a context for artists and anyone interested in the relationships between land, land use and the built environment to investigate, engage with and to propose innovative forms of interpretation of this fascinating place that exists on the edge of the void.

Here we met up with Steve Badgett and Matt Lynch, core members of artist collective Simparch, and who, as the name suggests, investigate simple architecture and DIY approaches to building, amongst other things. Originally drawn here by the residency program, Matt and Steve have spent the past 8 years developing a satellite facility at South Base, a few miles south of the unit. Clean Livin’ is an on-going, constantly-evolving experiment in low-tech, sustainable building technologies and has allowed for a different kind of human presence to evolve out of this once-abandoned site. It is a place where the line between dystopia and utopia is not so easy to draw.

“Because it is located off the grid on the edge of a landscape void, the project is also about autonomy, isolation, making do with a bare minimum, making something from next to nothing and exploring the basement of one's will...I see the project as about starting over from the ruins of the military, about the birth of the atomic age, and the possibility of global Armageddon. It's about making lemonade from lemons" - Matt Coolidge - from Simparch’s website.