Lost Wax
Rachel LaBine, Aishwarya Keshav
View Project
Lost Wax, a preemptive archive, addresses New York City’s gradually disappearing shores. 3D scans from five sites around the city become wax sculptures at 1:1 scale, beginning an ephemeral sculptural archive in light of the imminent sea-level rise in NYC. Each site is located within the steadily expanding floodplain.
Though scientific data on climate is publicly available, climate change has come to be largely viewed as a polarizing political topic, rather than the existential threat that it is. Lost Wax seeks to begin to address the failure of rhetoric that has led to this gap between data and society. Architectural elements, signage, and trees point to tangible, emotive, and local realities of climate change. The project brings forth data on an affective register, a preemptive gesture towards preserving sites around the city. The scans and objects index fragments of the sites, as any archive or memory can only partially hold its referent.
Special thanks to SOE Studio and Isolated Labs for their help with this project.
DATASETS
Sea Level Rise Maps (2020s 100-year Floodplain)
Sea Level Rise Maps (2050s 100-year Floodplain)
Sea Level Rise Maps (2050s 500-year Floodplain)