AMELIA JARVINEN

For too long the forest and city have been at odds. The one chopped down to build the other.

The Ramayana (an ancient Hindu epic) describes a forest-city inhabited by monkey creatures. It is called Kishkinda. It is not a bucolic paradise as would be understood in the West, but a place nonetheless where humans, flora and fauna live in immediate proximity.

What if New York could be transformed into a Kishkinda?

What if it was designed not by planners? But by the root systems of trees and mushrooms?

What if it was designed not as land but as land/water.

What if huge creatures appeared that slowly ate away the old city, and in their tracks left the beginnings of a verdant forest and a new post-human order.

What if these creatures - at first man-made, would become over time anabiotic entities living on their own, moving every further afield.

(anabiotic: restoring to life from a deathlike condition, in this case the city of New York)

Creatures that are part bio-organic machine, part deity, destroying and rebuilding.

A shape shifting city.  

A city which is not one.

^{words by Mark Jarzombek}