Elliot Bourne

Elliot is a graduating student at the Royal College of Art, having completed his undergraduate degree at Manchester School of Architecture. His upbringing in a small ex-mining town in South Wales provoked a keen interest in the problematic relationship between nature, economics and the environment.

Last year, with ADS7 [Transboundary Geo-logics: Politics of the Atmosphere] his project, Synthetic Control explored methods of slowing permafrost melt in Siberia. The project centred the moving East Siberia Taiga forest, as a body of entangled climatic actors, both reacting to and shaping, environmental change.

This year, with ADS 3, A Desert of Trees continues research into how the human and other relate. Understanding the concept of ‘a forest’ as a cultural product, employed in the context of Israel and Palestine to further a political agenda.

A DESERT OF TREES

"The Israeli settlers made the desert bloom."

This claim, alongside others, are employed to construct a world where the Jewish people are indigenous to, and most deserving of, Palestinian land. In this argument the other than human is employed to create an ecosystem which never existed - one that erases many forms of life and memories of what was formerly present.

Forests in Israel are not just masses of photosynthesising bodies but a manufactured Zionist tool, appropriated to create a landscape suited to the Jewish people. The forest is an aesthetic device, weaving the idea of a continued Jewish presence in Palestine into the texture of the landscape; an agent in realising the Zionist fiction of Eretz Yisrael, a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. The forests also acts as a mechanical and social apparatus. They are employed to claim land inexpensively and erase the record of recent history.

Contrary to the prevailing Israeli narrative this region has always been a blooming landscape. An understanding of history as a linear sequence of events is used to suggest an uninterrupted continuation of Jewish presence on the land; justifying occupation and violence. In order to counter this logic, the project constructs designed visions of multiple histories and potential futures of the landscape. History and future all exist in the same moment. These scenes have been uploaded to Google maps, georeferenced - living within the digital infrastructure of our daily lives, viewed through the same method as other recorded memories. The forest is mobilised as a vehicle through which to deconstruct Zionist myths, enacting the history of the place, and speculating on its future.