Still Loving Albany Bulb (landfill)
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Story & Experience
The Albany Bulb has a long and colorful history: it’s a landfill that began its life in the 1930’s with debris from the Transcontinental Railroad being pushed into the bay to create a parking lot. Over time, it’s grown over with mostly non-native plant species, and after 20 years of habitation by a large otherwise homeless populace and a changing array of urban artists, it has grown into an amazing wild-land composed of wild nature, industrial waste, and human creativity. After a long battle with activists, the site is currently being made into a regional park, and we arrived for our GEX ceremony the day construction began. Between us, we’ve been walking and photographing this land for over 40 years, so as we walked the myriad paths we told a lot of stories about the different flowerings we’ve seen come and go on this land. The art here changes constantly, decomposing and reappearing over time, and we took a moment to add our ritual offering to a piece that was already there, but spoke to our wishes as well.
The Albany Bulb has a long and colorful history: it’s a landfill that began its life in the 1930’s with debris from the Transcontinental Railroad being pushed into the bay to create a parking lot. Over time, it’s grown over with mostly non-native plant species, and after 20 years of habitation by a large otherwise homeless populace and a changing array of urban artists, it has grown into an amazing wild-land composed of wild nature, industrial waste, and human creativity. After a long battle with activists, the site is currently being made into a regional park, and we arrived for our GEX ceremony the day construction began. Between us, we’ve been walking and photographing this land for over 40 years, so as we walked the myriad paths we told a lot of stories about the different flowerings we’ve seen come and go on this land. The art here changes constantly, decomposing and reappearing over time, and we took a moment to add our ritual offering to a piece that was already there, but spoke to our wishes as well.
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