Geo-escharotomy

Under an overarching theme of 'urgencies', the project addresses damaged land caused by the exploitation and overconsumption of the environment. Humankind’s extractive relationship with nature has erased ecosystems and disconnected communities, causing them to lose their sense of belonging to their land. Deindustrialisation in Scotland’s Central Belt saw major resource-consuming industries decline, leaving behind blights in the landscape and broken relationships between community and nature. How might these scars, both physical and cultural, be healed?

Geo: of the land. Eschar: the damaged tissue found within wounds. Otomy: the surgical process of making an incision for analysis and treatment. Geo-escharotomy: the process of healing land scars. Healing scarred land and communities requires environmental stewardship to be fostered to spark a community-centric relationship with nature. Geo-escharotomy proposes a continuous, healing process to create responsive landscapes that learn and grow through catalytic interactions and the empowerment of communities. Across the Scottish Central Belt, three post-industrial scars of different phases have been selected to undergo the first stage of Geo-escharotomy: Ardeer Peninsula, a matured scar created by dynamite works; Ravenscraig, a present scar caused by steelworks; and Grangemouth, the wound of an oil refinery soon to become a scar. A healing team, including local experts, linguists and anthropologists is assembled to guide the process. Each scar demonstrates different methods of healing, responding to the specific needs of the land and community. Healing apparatus, acting as a catalyst, is inserted into the scars to foster environmental stewardship and address ecological challenges. The community documents their incremental land interactions within a one-year process to explore their catalytic experiences and plan their future actions. Through this process, the scarred land becomes an asset to the community as it promotes a new method of environmental stewardship and creates continuous narratives of healing that grow organically, in symbiosis with the land and community’s needs. The project explores healing scars through an analytical and storytelling process to convey the catalytic growth and organic journey that the communities adopt within their scarred landscapes.