Illuminating Futures 2015 - ongoing

Illuminating Futures is artist Dan Borelli's follow-up to his Artists' Prospectus for the Nation project, The Cloud of Unknowing: The Future Is Our History. Both projects have stemmed from Dan's commitment to help the people who live in his hometown of Ashland, MA, come to grips with the Superfund-level effects that water and soil contamination from the Nyanza colorant plant* and its predecessors at the site have had on public health in the area. As Dan worked on The Cloud of Unknowing, he was able to establish a network of creative partners, including The Arts Company, and supportive local institutions that allowed him to expand it from a one-person project commemorating friends who died from contamination-induced cancer to a much larger “distributed institution” that worked on the initial stages of an exhibition at the Ashland Public Library, produced a teaching unit for a course at the Harvard School of Public Health and fed into his Illuminating Futures project.

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Illuminating Futures has three components: 

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Library Exhibition

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The library exhibition came to fruition and was on view from September 25 through December 19, 2015 and continues on as an interactive website.

(Partly as a result of Dan's interactions with the EPA, the library now houses one of the EPA's first Field Repositories for a Superfund site.)

 

As Dan has written: "During the initial stages of cleanup in 1988, the people of Ashland demanded that remediation findings be made public and the EPA agreed to launch this important program. Over 25 years later as we look at the collection of binders, we can skim the history of the contaminants. What's not here are the stories of people, how they were impacted, the culture of loss -- the narrative of the contaminated. This exhibit juxtaposed the qualitative stories from people within the space of the quantitative data from the EPA. Working with the EPA and using their data, a scale model and set of mappings helped people orient and to project their own memories onto this subject. It culminated in a reflection station where visitors could browse new books that we purchased under the subject of ecology and leave us their own personal reflections."

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Memorial Healing Garden

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Established in 2016 and ongoing, the Memorial Healing Garden is located on a town-owned parcel behind the left-field fence at the Ashland Middle School baseball field. The healing garden transforms a publicly accessible area near the Nyanza Superfund site into a space for contemplation. With a local team overseen by the New England Laborers Training Academy, Borelli created a polychromatic sundial and a rainwater harvest table for use by the Ashland Public Schools science curriculum. Also, "here you can retreat and consider the overall implications of the various histories, geographies, and human impact on this high ground known as Megunko Hill," according to Dan.

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The Memorial Healing Garden was inaugurated on June 18, 2016. The event began with a Strawberry Moon and Healing ceremony performed in the garden by members of the Nipmuc Tribe, contemporary descendants of the Native Americans who inhabited nearby Megunko Hill where the Superfund site is located. The event continued with a free community dinner in the outfield of the Ashland Middle School baseball field, which abuts the memorial garden, and concluded that night with a streetlight intervention (see below), which traced the contaminated groundwater plume that still lies below much of Ashland.  

 

In summer 2017, the colored plexiglas panels of the garden's pavilion

were vandalized. They were repaired in 2023 and the garden reopened to the public on November 18, 2023.. 

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Streetlights

 

Since he began his Nyanza project, people have been asking Dan "where is the contamination today?" In answer, he created a street light intervention on June 18, 2016, "where the scientific color gradients of the below-grade contamination are transposed to the existing street lighting grid." 

 

In writing about the project, he says: "Given that the Nyanza site had 100 different source chemicals, what remains is a unique cocktail of sludge below grade. The plume moves around across time but the concentrations appear fairly consistent. The colors signify areas of concentration, Red being the most concentrated and slowly decreasing into Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue and the Purple roughly mapping the extents of the monitoring area. The result is a polychromatic environment that shifts color in order to create a new cognitive map of place."

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He also created a model of current contamination extent for the Ashland Public Library exhibition: