Project by James Haynes
This project approaches the Spring Street Salt Shed as an infrastructural actor embedded within a wider network of material, climatic, and logistical relations. Drawing on Bruno Latour and Actor–Network Theory, the work reframes architecture as a mediator that coordinates planetary extraction, seasonal weather, municipal labor, and urban maintenance. Salt operates as a more-than-human agent whose presence intensifies and recedes throughout the year, reorganizing streets, machines, surfaces, and bodies. A series of layered drawings and renderings make visible how these actors appear, disappear, and reconfigure over time, foregrounding overlooked actors. The project began with an index of rubbings and photographs that register wear, residue, and neglect, attending to how infrastructures of care are themselves uncared for. Rather than treating representation as neutral documentation, the work uses drawing as a mediating device that assembles heterogeneous, trans-scalar actors onto a shared surface, revealing the distributed agencies that sustain - and corrode - New York City.
