Project by Hayden St John, Maya Yildirim
Beyond Capacity manages living and dying in states of crisis: intersectionally quotidian, extraordinary, collective, generational, and discriminatory. The capacity of existing systems to respond to crises is revealed at full saturation, necessitating exchange and negotiation. Saturation, the uneven distribution of resources and demands that cause pressure on existing systems, necessitates creation.
Our intervention exists as a public commons. We intervene at Van Cortlandt park, and our proposal is prototypical for the fifteen municipally owned golf courses throughout New York City that drain resources and pollute surrounding communities. The intertwining of burial mounds and agricultural fields confronts death as a process in living and returns matter to the earth to sustain life. These conditions are seen as the new grounds for the city’s municipal cemetery that collapse the infrastructures of prevention, response, and reflection. Beyond Capacity is both a pragmatic infrastructure and a landscape of collective living, healing, and dying.
