Blurred Edges, Shifting Dynamics or Mangrove Return | 2024
As a compliment to landscape architecture design work undertaken in Panama City, Panama in Spring 2024, I made this animation from my imaginings of mangrove habitats at the edge of the old city. Various techniques in this work allowed me to experiment with both computer and physical 2-D methods, also analogous to how I approach and conceptualize design work in landscape, urban spaces, and the public realm. In particular, the creative process of working in animation gives me the opportunity to engage with more fantastical versions or readings of climate change, risk, habitat loss in urban and historical contexts, such as Panama City. A place with amazing ecological and biological diversity, rapid urbanization has meant that natural resiliency systems such as the large mangrove areas that used to inhabit the transition between land and sea, have been severely diminished and depleted.
The scenes depicted in this animation are derived from a number of techniques and sources. One relies primarily on working in Maya Computer Animation software, and also brings in video I shot in Panama City and 3-D scan footage I made with an iPhone app. These scenes are conceived from the vantage point of a post-apocalyptic underworld, a mangrove seascape largely devoid of sea plants and animals; another follows the path of a gecko as it traverses the forest floor and attempts to make sense of its new home. To tell the story of the growth of the old city and loss of habitat, historic maps are animated and overlaid with hand painted transparencies to demonstrate projected flood inundation risks in the marshland-mudflat zone adjacent to the old city, a present-day UNESCO World Heritage Area.
To tell the story of a nearby remnant mangrove forest, a prominent piece of city now defunct infrastructure at the city’s edge, is show over a period of the past twenty years. Stills from Google Earth are animated to make visible mangrove regeneration as a result of brackish waters mixing with the rising and falling of the Pacific Ocean tide.
One of the final mangrove scenes is comprised of video footage I shot in Panama City, to capture how mangrove reintroduction and regrowth in the marshland-mudflat zone might be conceived of. The video was ran through a monitor in the computer animation studio and I animated over the top of the footage with 2-D mangrove tree cut outs.
By employing these experimental techniques, I hope to draw viewers to differing possibilities of how urban density, habitat integration, regeneration and repair can be envisioned in the face of changing climate dynamics and water levels.