THE ART OF TOUCHING THE GROUND ______

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Friday, June 22, 2012

Thesis Final Booklet _ Work in Progress

Xiaoxuan Lu Academic Works PART I

http://issuu.com/xiaoxuanlu/docs/hku2

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

great thinking comes out of discussion

Charles Waldheim_

NUANCED APPROACH

John Davids_

…the 270 million bombs both "trampled" the land and then indeed prevented the land from further colonial exploitation afterward…

(*back to my ‘the art of touching the ground’/the bombs are protecting the land in an irony way)

…How much cleaning/mining you allow will be your critique of both the past abuses and the abuse inherent in raw, unmitigated colonial/capitalist exploitation

Brian Goldstein_

…making the gold companies into your "landscape architects"

(*the digging and reconstructing idea)

Don't necessarily take the Australians' presence as a given--work with it… (maybe) there is no one else who can do it and you must work around them, but your goal is to make their presence positive

Kelly Doran and Pierre Belanger_

Ground and aerial

Social culture value

More than REMEDY

Gold Buddha

Layers (Soil condition, water)

Grading the land

Gridding the land

other forces shaping the landscape (Weathering)

critic of the Infinite search of pattern

improve current logic / thinking

rethinking about waste

Diversifying the interrelation

Gold mining as Incubator

The lease outline

Taking advantage of the waste/ By product

Rethinking about the ‘bigness’

How you use the area that you can’t touch / Excluded land

post-midterm/post-war/post-mining

MID-TERM REVIEW

Monday, March 26^th, 11:00am-6:30pm, Room 123

DISCUSSION

today, Wednesday, March 28^th, 10:30am-12:30pm, Room 510
with Kelly Nelson Doran and Pierre Belanger
2pm - 3pm

with Pro. Kongjian Yu

-need a few hours’ break now—

-then-

PENNY WHITE PRESENTATION

The Art of Touching the Ground

Friday, March 30^th, 1:30pm-2:30pm, , Room 124

PRESENTATION

Mining as Demining

to BLA2551 class, Chulalongkorn University，Thailand

Saturday 10:00am -11:00am, March 24^th

THESIS MEETING

With Pierre Belanger

Tuesday, April 3^rd, 3:00pm

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Friday, January 20, 2012

Update Penny White Trip Part III _ INFRA PICTURES

I finally got those films developed *one day* before the thesis kick-off meeting on the 19^th, Jan, 2012.

MAG bomb clearance site, Xiang Khouang, Laos

Foreground: rice paddy field in dry season when farmers are not growing rice on site, but rather growing vegetables in the gardens near by. Yellow sticks in the field indicate where the MAG team has found the UXO, which will be destroyed at 3 pm everyday.

Background: spots of vegetation over the hill indicate where the bomb craters are - four decades after the bombing ended, the bomb craters have changed from symbols of death into ones of life - most of them are now covered with trees or shrubs. White patches over the hill indicate the clearings local people made to trap swallows, which is a special food Xieng Khouang is famous for.

MAG bomb clearance site, Xiang Khouang, Laos

Her name is Vienglada, Deputy Team Leader of UCT13, MAG.

MAG bomb clearance site, Xiang Khouang, Laos

The clearance site has been used as rice paddy field for more than 30 years. The owners of the land grow rice on site in raining season. They know there are UXO, and they found scrap metal on site all the time, but they have no choice other than keep farming.
The clearance site is around 4 hectar. The operation started on 28/12/2011. I got there on the 5th of Jan, by then, the team found and destroyed 79 BLU UXO. One day before I got there, they found a 500 lb big bomb.