Earth Moves
Marcus Yau
The project explores the possibility of transitional architecture and infrastructure {such as freshwater collection points, temporary spaces of shelter for both farmers and animals, wind pumps) that can be inhabited in order to facilitate the island community's seasonal migration pattern through their pastoral activities located on barrier islands of the Wadden Sea. The project reads the territory in 3 different ways - harnessing the natural forces of wind to pump freshwater from the ground, the geological placement of the water pumps, and the movement of the pastoral communities reading the surface condition of the landscape.
Since the Wadden Sea region was legally deemed a nature reserve in order to protect and conserve the regional natural habitat and biodiversity (UNESCO World Heritage site and an EU Natura 2000 Zone), existing multi-generational pastoral communities on the barrier islands are facing a complete cut on agricultural subsidies from their respective municipalities, having most of their funds redirected to scientific research and the promotion of sustainable tourism. The protection scheme therefore not only disregards the existence of these communities, they assume these vulnerable landscapes are completely uninhabited, which is evidently not the case.
Because of this, the existing pastoral communities on the barrier Islands are increasingly vulnerable threatened both by the acceleration in environmental changes as well as a new financial instability. If the environmental protection scheme imposed reads the landscape as a transnational one, the scheme should also protect their rights of land use as commons and their pastoral practices as they should be part of the Wadden Sea culture and landscape heritage. A new form of care over the territory through pastoral activities can be used to hack into the protection scheme as a part of the Trilateral Wadden Sea Plan (WSP) - a transnational scheme between Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands devised to govern the vulnerable landscape. There is not only a living heritage, but a productive one at risk of displacement - these values should be an integral part of the nature protection scheme.
The current static grazing activities can be re-imagined through a seasonal pattern that allows the pastoral communities to be seasonally sedentary, but periodically nomadic. Theirtrans-islandic movement within the Wadden Sea territory through grazing activities would provide the care that the landscape needs as well as ensuring their autonomy while decreasing the vulnerability of both their pastoral practices and their susceptibility to environmental factors. This would in-turn reclaim the pastoral communities' existing rights over the landscape.
Although the project is situated in a territorial scale, The unprotected barrier islands of Rottumerplaat, Rottumeroog and Zuiderduin will be the testing ground to which the project emerges as they are a geopolitical and territorial disruptor for resource extraction in the sea.