“Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed of the world's debris.” - Michel de Certeau
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This series of small collages, representing oysters, is composed of found material collected from city streets: food wrappers, receipts, junk mail, parking tickets, political fliers, plastic, cardboard. Layers and textures build up gradually, over time, like real oyster shells.
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Oysters used to be so numerous in the Hudson River that all the water was filtered and cleaned by these bivalves in a matter of days. A keystone species, they provided nourishment and habitat for smaller marine creatures, and were a central food source for the Lenape people as well as settlers. Overharvesting reduced their population dramatically, and pollution rendered them unsafe for consumption. The depletion of oysters is inseparable from the displacement of the peoples who depended on them, both erasures driven by the same logic of extraction.
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Now, restoration efforts are underway, reintroducing oysters to the Hudson as both ecological recovery and climate infrastructure.