Dammed to Fail

2020-2021

Bős - Nagymaros, Hungary

video; zine; research-design

Supervised by Dr. Esra Akcan, Sana Frini
Sands Goodwin Memorial Award (Thesis Prize)

This research driven design projects theorises architecture's potential in subverting the legacy of nature transformation projects without erasing them from collective memory.

At its focus lies the history of the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros Dam system, a half-realised infrastructural project, which has since come to symbolise the end of socialism in Hungary. Environmentalism was the only form of permissible state critique in the Eastern Block, so it is not a coincidence that the protests against the hydropower project came to signify politics beyond environmental preservation. Although only the Gabčíkovo half of the dam was realised, it left a mark on the region through the permanent loss of biodiversity, displacement of ethnic minorities, and the transformation of economic livelihood.

I argue that infrastructures produced by a politics of domination will reproduce the same power relations. By drawing on a transitional justice framework, this project proposes to reprogramme the infrastructural objects into a centre for non-recurrence to human and more-than-human victims of ecocide.

THE ZINE

The centre for non-recurrence is a series of interventions located along three key sites on the Danube that addresses the remnant infrastructures of a violent failure. Each site broadly correlates to different aspects of transitional justice. The first location is dedicated to truth-seeking, the second to ensure non-recurrence, while the last one addressing reparations of biodiversity.

The sites span across nearly 200 km, so it is not an easily accessible museum. It is a pilgrimage upstream along the Danube that operates as a transitional justice memorial to violence against the environment and thus various stakeholders by adapting existing infrastructures for educational purposes.

The interventions were designed to be toured along with a zine-like guide. The medium of this booklet is not only a common grassroots tool for transitional justice, but it is also a reference to the ‘samizdat’, an illegal make-shift publication through which dissident information was spread in the Eastern Block.