Monument to Extraction:
Walking California History at the Albany Bulb Landfill
Outdoor tour and exhibition, San Francisco Bay, CA
UC Berkeley Future Histories Lab and Love the Bulb
Launched April 22-December 31, 2021
Downloadable tour available permanently
At the edge of a thriving city, a vast pile of construction waste called the Albany Bulb is a good place to study the connections between extractive resources and our everyday lives. This 20th-century landfill juts a mile into San Francisco Bay on a slender causeway and its chunks of concrete, rebar, asphalt, and steel slag expose the energy-intensive lifecycles of urban and suburban industry, development, and decay.
In Monument to Extraction: Walking California History at the Albany Bulb, UC Berkeley students have created an outdoor journey through the history of California at this mostly uncapped landfill, which is now a public park where people walk their dogs and birdwatch amidst piles of rubble. By interpreting the materials of the dump underfoot in the context of regional and global flows of raw materials and consumption, the students seek to reveal rather than erase the complex interactions of humans and landscape.
Visitors will be invited to take a 1.5 mile-long audio tour that will lead them through an accidental outdoor museum of discarded energy-intensive building materials. Along the way, augmented reality and art installations will link these materials to histories of extraction that are embodied in landscapes visible across spectacular vistas of San Francisco Bay.
The dump overlooks the site of a 19th-century dynamite factory that supplied the mining industry and transformed landscapes across the American West. From the Albany Bulb’s steep hillsides one can also see the site of World War II shipyards that drew raw materials and laborers from across the country, industrialized the region and catalyzed histories of racial segregation and struggle. The mud under the landfill is made of mercury-laden sediment washed down more than a century ago by hydraulic gold mining in the distant Sierra Nevada.
The cranes of the Port of Oakland visible from the shores of the landfill tell the story of the container shipping industry that transformed production and consumption around the entire Pacific Rim. Extractive histories of food, transportation, housing, oil and human labor echo back and forth between the materials at the site and the nearby urban landscape, including the demolished and buried sacred shellmounds of the Huchiun Ohlone people.
The Bulb lies in the middle of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, which suppresses rather than illuminates this history of industry and extraction. The concept of the park, which is still under construction, focuses on the restoration of wetlands and the establishment of an illusion of pristine nature wherever possible. The reality is that this has been a working waterfront for centuries that has had significant impacts on environments near and far.
The self-guided walking tour of the Bulb explores the contradictions inherent in the park’s attempt to create wilderness out of human-made land. This exhibition-journey aims to reveal the transformations humans have wrought and to provide a space for visitors to ask questions of their own role in both past and future landscape histories.
The tour aims to help visitors immerse all their senses in the landscape. Ironically, it does this through the use of smartphones that are designed to spirit humans out of the present and into virtual worlds, and manufactured from rare earth minerals extracted from around the globe. The project also invites visitors to ponder the devices in their hands as windows into histories of environmental devastation.
This exhibition and tour is a collaboration between the UC Berkeley Future Histories Lab and Love the Bulb. It is curated by Susan Moffat, who taught the course Ghosts and Visions (Art 160/City Planning 190 in Spring 2021). That humanities studio course included UC Berkeley undergraduates in Architecture, Art, Computer Science, Environmental Economics and Policy, Interdisciplinary Studies, Legal Studies, Public Health and Urban Studies; and graduate students in the Masters in Design, Masters in Journalism, and Master in Fine Arts programs. They conducted historical research and created virtual and physical exhibits and experiences.
The project was supported with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a Creative Discovery grant from UC Berkeley Arts + Design.
It is part of the global environmental art series Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss.
The exhibition will be in place April 22-December 31, 2021 (although the ephemeral parts of the installations will disappear over time) and the audio tour can be experienced any time starting April 22. Information on how to take the tour, and images of the outdoor installations can be found at monumenttoextraction.org.
