GARDENS
Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies
Umeå University
Chicago Architecture Biennale 2025 [CAB6]
SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change
1 This planetary threat, tracked by AI-based Amazon Mining Watch, reveals an urgent need for transborder environmental protections and post-extractive restoration. “36% of Amazon gold mining deforestation now occurs within protected areas and Indigenous territories. Despite enforcement in some regions, a transnational response is needed to confront illegal extraction and protect ecological sovereignty.” — MAAP Report #226, Amazon Conservation, 2024
Territorial overview of the Orinoco’s sedimentary networks, where upstream extractivism reshapes deltaic ecologies. Territorial overview of the Orinoco’s sedimentary networks, where upstream extractivism reshapes deltaic ecologies at planetary scale. From this aerial perspective, the deltas of the Orinoco and the Amazon appear as continental sediment engines. They pulse nutrients, organic matter, and industrial residue into the Atlantic and Caribbean basins. These flows are not neutral. They encode histories of mining, agriculture, deforestation, and infrastructural violence, redistributing them through estuarine systems, marine trophic webs, and oceanic sedimentation. The deltas function as metabolic borders, receiving what inland territories can no longer absorb. They also reveal the spatial delay of extraction, where the environmental costs of inland disruption only manifest downstream, far from their origin. This planetary cartography links the invisible margins of mining operations with the shifting thresholds of marine ecosystems. It invites a redefinition of accountability that is hydrological, political, and transoceanic. This planetary view links local degradation to global hydrological systems. Seen from above, two colossal delta systems, the Amazonas (south) and the Orinoco (north), pulse sediment, nutrients, and organic matter into the Atlantic and Caribbean basins. These hydrological giants shape the continental shelf, fertilize marine ecosystems, and redistribute the metabolic memory of inland territories marked by mining, agriculture, and deforestation. This planetary cartography renders visible the transoceanic impact of extractivism: upstream violence materializes downstream as sediment drift, planktonic shifts, and coastal instability.
Future Garden, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University.
Future Gardens interrogates the forces that silently devastate this environment: illegal mining operations, shadow economies, and systemic exploitation of Indigenous territories. These forces fracture the fragile equilibrium that sustains the Orinoco basin. Through a blend of investigative geospatial methods, immersive visualization, and speculative design, the exhibition exposes the escalating devastation caused by mineral extraction and the absence of meaningful environmental protections.
Epicenter of territorial collapse in the Guayana Shield. Las Claritas anchors a sprawling network of illegal mines spreading along the Cuyuni River, fragmenting ecosystems, poisoning waterways, and encoding extractive violence into the forest’s infrastructure. Operating as an informal gold-mining enclave since the early 1980s, it today covers roughly 4,781 hectares - an area equivalent to nearly 6,300 soccer fields - according to NGO mapping of the Arco Minero region, see SEC+11Youth4Nature+11Mongabay+11. Las Claritas is deeply enmeshed in a paramilitary-controlled supply chain, with thousands of informal miners working amid brothels, malaria outbreaks, and rampant environmental degradation, see Pulitzer Center.
Future Garden, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University.
We envision a network of restorative gardens, generating emerging territorial forms and multispecies ecosystems within critical zones of extraction and collapse. The exhibition seeks to redefine boundaries of protection and regulation, fostering deeper understanding of landscape patterns, long-term ecological health, and resilience. By exposing the layers affecting sensitive ecosystems, Future Gardens raises critical questions about how these evolving territories are governed, and what role we play in shaping their futures. It offers a platform for reflection, territorial action, and alternative scenarios for restoring some of the planet’s most precious and fragile ecosystems.
Left: Territorial overview of Las Claritas, Venezuela’s largest informal gold mining settlement, embedded in the forest edge.
Right: Zoomed-in patterns reveal cohabitation within extraction, where dwellings, roads, and subsistence-polluted soil coexist with mercury-laced tailings and excavated craters. The juxtaposition of toxic debris exposes the wounds as testimony to territorial violence and a clear case of geospatial environmental injustice.
Image credit: Future Gardens, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University. Chicago Architecture Biennial, 2025.
A toxic lagoon begins to reassemble life. Mercury scars and eroded sediments form anaerobic pockets in the center, while bioremediating flora take root in mineral-laden shallows. The landscape is neither natural nor fully artificial. It is a constructed terrain of recovery, where damaged ecologies metabolize industrial residue into conditions for future growth. At one edge, hybrid plants stabilize slopes and absorb residual toxins. At another, floating mats of vegetation create microhabitats that buffer pH imbalances. This ecosystem is not idealized. It is fragile, transitional, and full of contradictions. Yet it signals a turning point where contamination and regeneration begin to coexist in spatial negotiation. The lagoon becomes a testing ground, where design, biology, and time experiment together to invent new grounds for life. On the right, bioremediating flora root in mineral-soaked shallows. On the left, this speculative habitat merges mutant vegetation with altered soils, where hybrid ecologies regenerate from extraction’s residue. Future Garden, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University.
Industrial corridors, hydrological basins, and sediment deltas operate as continental infrastructures. Upstream extraction determines downstream collapse. These networks expose the limits of national governance and reveal the need for trans-regional environmental frameworks.
Pollution and river systems cross political boundaries, demanding cooperative governance models. Bioregional frameworks that link Amazonian and Caribbean states point toward shared ecological responsibility rather than isolated national control.
A serpentine tributary chokes into a chain of mercury-laced lagoons and extraction pits. This toxic archipelago interrupts the forest’s ecological rhythm, forming a hybrid zone where contamination breeds adaptation. Each pond holds a different toxic legacy. Some are active craters, others abandoned basins colonized by microbial life and sediment flows. What emerges is a fluid mosaic of contaminated ecologies that nonetheless host emergent forms of survival. The soil remembers everything. Gold dust, petroleum residues, ghost settlements, and buried tools persist as chemical traces. This landscape is not only mined, it is haunted. The topography absorbs history and toxicity, generating a suspended terrain between collapse and mutation, erosion and potential. What is visible from above is only part of the narrative. Beneath the surface, biogeochemical processes activate new cycles of decay and reassembly, suggesting the forest’s slow negotiation with its altered condition.
Future Garden, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University
By situating these designs within the larger geopolitical context, the installation question the broader implications of sovereignty, autocracy, and the ability (or inability) to enforce ecological preservation. The exhibition will also examine how territorial claims and economic interests intersect with the urgent need to protect planetary life systems for future generations.
Meanwhile, the Las Claritas mining complex, active since the 1930s, continues to expand at alarming speed: its tailings, acid ponds, and clandestine distribution routes forming a toxic network across the Guayana Shield. These conditions produce what we term a toxic lattice: an unstable frontier where ecological collapse coexists with shadows ecodomies, labour exploitation and forest memory.
Aerial image of Las Claritas, a sprawling informal gold mining enclave embedded in the Guayana Shield. Acidic ponds, tailings, and sediment flows trace a toxic lattice that fractures the forest canopy and reshapes river ecologies. This image captures the physical geometry of contamination: sediment fans, cyanide-rich craters, mercury-laced watercourses, and cleared roads etched into the Amazonian biome. Each line marks not only extraction, but logistics, routes of movement, export, and exchange. The lattice, as a spatial condition, reflects more than environmental collapse: it encodes the overlapping sovereignty of state actors, armed factions, and informal labor economies. This entanglement of infrastructural violence and metabolic disruption positions Las Claritas as a paradigmatic node in the planetary feedback loop of illegal gold, atmospheric emissions, and transnational capital flows.
Future Garden, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University.
Fluctuating zones and boundaries. Future Gardens. A Haiek, R Rudolph.
Moving beyond the devastation, the installation present speculative environmental futures, imagining new forms of restorative landscapes and protective infrastructures. These will include bioremediation processes monitored on these future ecological sanctuaries that can readapted as refuges for biodiversity. The display invites to experience potential models of carbon-free territories, multispecies biotopes, and eco-infrastructures that strive for post-extractive healing, portrating post human ecologies visions. The exhibiton present a paradox of a post human future, as the only way deeptime allows these technogeographies in the near future to reawake.
This exhibition will provide a platform for dialogue about the future of these territories and fragile ecosystemic bodies, examining the ethical, legal, and environmental implications of extractive industries and the possibility to formulate new environmental fluctuating boundaries, jurisdictional frameworks and forms of conservation and ecological restoration. The exhibition aims to inspire a deeper understanding of how we might begin to repair our damaged planet and reimagine the possibility of post-industrial scars can thrive long into the future.
Speculative diagram of bioremediation processes transforming mining voids into dynamic ecosystems. This section articulates a future scenario in which environmental repair is not decorative but systemic, driven by Indigenous agroforestry, mineral decay, and microbial life. Each intervention is layered. Phytoremediation stabilizes heavy metals, fungal networks decompose hydrocarbons, and bacteria initiate soil reactivation. The terrain is no longer abandoned but reprogrammed. Former pits become hybrid wetlands, erosion basins host pioneer species, and voids evolve into metabolically active zones. The diagram proposes not just a recovery, but a reinvention of land use and ecological relations, where living systems perform territorial care. Here, Eden is not a return to purity, but an emergent synthesis of contamination, survival, and slow regeneration. Future Garden, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University.
Future Gardens explores the regenerative potential of bioremediation in post-extractive terrains across the Venezuelan Amazon, where illegal mining and petro-industrial expansion reshape one of the planet’s most vital hydrological systems. The project intersects speculative design, Indigenous land knowledge, and ecological intelligence to imagine new life forms and inhabitable terrains emerging from toxicity and collapse. Set across the Orinoco River basin, an intricate web of tributaries, deltas, and sediment engines, the project reveals how upstream extractivism imprints violence into the continental flow, transforming forest systems and planetary capillarity. From the mercury-laced lagoons of Las Claritas, Venezuela’s largest informal gold mining enclave, to the engineered grid of Bosque de Uverito, once the world’s largest manually planted forest, these landscapes record the afterlife of extraction and the spatial codes of industrial ambition.
Reclamation lakes and contaminated wetlands act as repair zones, where biology and chemistry collaborate. Mercury, soil, and flora interact to create new, uncertain reservoirs of regeneration. These spaces host the first signs of recovery.
Perfect Conditions for Life to Flourish
There are no perfect conditions, only shifting ones. Life persists through mutation and imbalance, finding continuity within instability. Adaptation itself becomes the measure of survival.
A surreal ecological fiction where fungi, amphibians, hybrid species, and speleothems coevolve in toxic landscapes. A layered biotopia rooted in soil healing and community symbiosis. This speculative section reveals overlapping strata of life and matter, where contamination acts as both threat and generator of adaptation. In the underground layer, mycelial webs transfer nutrients and memory through polluted soils. Amphibians evolve chemical resistances and occupy unstable wetlands. Above ground, new vegetation patterns emerge. Mutant roots interlace with decomposing machinery, and altered flora hosts unexpected alliances of insects, spores, and birds. Rather than portraying remediation as a singular event, the image narrates an ongoing choreography between lifeforms and damaged terrain.
The network is not symbolic, it is infrastructural. This is a living archive of survival design, where post-industrial evolution materializes through entangled biologies.
Future Garden, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University.
Boundaries between legality and ecology dissolve into fictions. In the absence of clear jurisdiction, nature becomes both subject and witness, and territory transforms into an unstable archive of shifting control. Satellite views suggest boundaries between forest and mine, but contamination crosses them. Pollutants migrate through rivers and air, forming invisible continuities that defy jurisdiction. The idea of a fixed landscape dissolves; what remains is a field of gradients, flows, and reactions. Bioremediation and synthetic ecologies propose new futures for post-extractive terrains. These ecological imaginaries envision life emerging from collapse, hybrid habitats where species, materials, and technologies co-evolve.
Bacteria, fungi, and algae drive transformations below the human scale. In the post-mining zones of the Cuyuní-Orinoco basin, mercury-laden soils begin to regenerate through microbial, fungal, and vegetal choreography. Bacteria (Desulfovibrio, Pseudomonas) transform and volatilize mercury; fungi (Rhizophagus, Pisolithus) bind metals and stabilize sediments. Macrophytes like Typha domingensis and Eichhornia crassipes filter and oxygenate the soil, enabling flowering pioneers - Passiflora, Heliconia, Inga - to attract stingless bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. These organisms process toxins, generate new compounds, and alter soil chemistry. Their activity defines habitability, determining which species can survive within the contaminated terrain.
Future Garden, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University.
When extraction ends, the mine becomes a host. Toxic basins and eroded slopes turn into habitats for microbial, vegetal, and animal life. In the flooded tailings, sulfate- and iron-reducing bacteria (Desulfovibrio, Geobacter) activate the first metabolic shifts, while mer-operon bacteria (Pseudomonas, Bacillus) reduce and volatilize mercury, preparing the soil for new life. What was once a wound begins to function as a fragile ecosystem of hospitality.
This is the rebirth of the landscape: a metabolic choreography where bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals reassemble damaged matter into new conditions for life.
Fungi and lichens (Rhizophagus, Pisolithus) weave mycorrhizal scaffolds that bind sediment and store toxins, creating a living crust where macrophytes like Eichhornia crassipes, Typha domingensis, and Paspalum repens take root. Their rhizomes filter heavy metals and reoxygenate the soil, initiating a slow biological reprogramming.
From contamination emerges new ecologies. As toxicity recedes, flowering species attract stingless bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds, forming self-sustaining pollination corridors.
The river bleeds rust. Sediment clouds and viscous black ponds trace the exhaustion of the Cuyuni basin. These scars are not just surface disturbances. They signal a hydrological system overwhelmed by mercury runoff, unfiltered tailings, and unregulated excavation. The extraction patterns read like surgical wounds, slicing through riparian corridors, destabilizing aquatic habitats, and opening chasms for which no repair protocol exists. These black pools are not inert. They bubble, reflect, and transform. Chemical blooms interact with microbial colonies and decomposing organic matter, producing an unstable biochemical theater. Amid this exhaustion, the forest resists. Beneath the surface, the roots anchor memory, and in scattered margins, a new vegetation cycle quietly begins. The terrain holds contradictory signals. Collapse and resistance are entangled, generating a spatial condition where degradation and resilience coexist in tension.
Future Garden, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University.
The audio-visual material derives from our attempts to render nature as a static vision, projecting 150 years from now. By putting together a sequence of iterative biobased design experiments takes life in stop-motions sequences.
By superposing traces of biological transformation - revealing the metabolism of landscapes and the deep-time progression of ecological succession. Merging data and fiction constructs visual hypotheses of post-extractive Amazonian futures.
Using complex 3D modeling, prompt-based image generation, and satellite data, the work explores how new and traditional tools can render possible futures.
Future Garden, Alejandro Haiek & Rebecca Rudolph, Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies, Umeå University.
Photo: Travis Roozee
- Alejandro Haiekalejandro.haiek@umu.se
- Rebecca Rudolphrebecca.rudolph@umu.se
Phone: +46 73 380 39 26
laboratory of intersectional ecologies
umeå university
www.labprofab.org
