NEW INC Y12 Creative Science: Afterpresence: Scent, Place, and Urban Ecologies

This work stages spatial and sensory situations where suppressed ecologies are encountered rather than represented, not as historical reconstruction but as conditions that can be felt again. Many of New York City’s ecological systems no longer exist as visible landscapes. Filled hydrology, contaminated soil, and infrastructural overlay have transformed living ecologies into conditions that continue to register through material consequence and trace. These conditions are most often accessed through historical reconstruction and ecological mapping (Sanderson 2009). This work proposes another mode of access, one that is both physical and perceptual, built from the inside of an encounter rather than observed from outside it.