Mackenzie Champlin

Abruptly Laid to Rest

Landscape, Infrastructure, Remediation

A wave of more incendiary climate activism, from spraying paintings with soup to attacking infrastructure, has begun to emerge. Some may call them climate extremists; some may call them realists. We may find the news shocking or disruptive of our current lifestyles; it is hard to process yet we yearn for change.

Rather than brand these activists disruptive or counterproductive, what future might we imagine if we consider a legitimate potential in their actions?

This project proposes a speculative scenario where a wave of radical climate action leads to an abrupt end to oil production. From attacks on pipelines, to terminal blockades, the narrative builds a backstory based on plausible future conflicts.

Beginning after the end of oil, the project takes on five sites integral to the flow of petroleum and imagines them repurposed for public use: the oil field, the storage terminal, the refinery, the pipeline, and the gas station. Sites long abused by chemical processing and years of extraction are in the process of being remediated and reclaimed.

The film explores these five sites adapted as part of a new funeral ritual. The oil field where we once extracted becomes a cemetery: a place where we return to the earth. The gas station becomes a mortuary: a place where the journey of death begins. Along the way the body visits other sites where it is prepared, celebrated, and remembered.

In these new landscapes, new funeral traditions borrow from global cultures while imagining a hopeful practice that embraces pan-cultural beliefs. The interventions speculate on opportunities to remediate and foster emergent ecologies through both mechanical and phytoremediation. While incisions, excavations, and augmentations transform the industrial relics, seizing new aesthetic opportunities in the process of restitution.

As we move toward a world divested from oil, the project looks forward to what we might gain in the process. What are we willing to sacrifice? What would we miss? And what would we find if we let go of attachments?

Abruptly Laid to Rest

Mortuary Refrigerators

People Walking Beside a Pipeline

Gas Station Pumps

Oil Pumpjack on a Hillside