Biosphere 2 is an Earth systems research facility on occupied Tohono O’odham land (in so-called Oracle, Arizona, just north of Cuk Ṣon, so-called Tucson). It has a rather strange history. What started as a utopian project to test the feasibility of a closed ecological system for use in future outer space habitats, it ran into highly publicized scientific, engineering, and interpersonal problems—not to mention the bizarre fact that Steve Bannon was briefly involved after the failure of its first occupation.
I arrived at the Biosphere 2 for a conference in February of 2018. I grew up in Tucson and remember going on field trips there in the late 1990s. I was interested in seeing how the campus fared after 20 years, so I made sure to set aside some time during the conference to wander the grounds and record what I felt in my fieldnotes and through photos.
These photographs are mixed-format. They were taken with either my DSLR (a Canon T2i) or a Minolta X-370 loaded with Tri-X 400-ISO black and white film. Since this was an exercise in affect, I left both cameras on auto so as to hold my technical brain at bay; I only needed to adjust the f-stop on my film camera.
(Click images to enlarge and enter slideshow.)
Metal domes and clear pyramids jut out of the desert floor in southern Arizona. This is the campus of Biosphere 2: a utopian project turned capitalist opportunity turned environmental laboratory operated by the University of Arizona.The Biosphere 2 habitat lies coiled like a metallic snake, weaving its body of twisted metal around strutted towers that stretch out toward the sky.The phallic towers stand erect in the presence of the hot, desert sun. Although they stand bulbous and engorged, they are actually silent and empty. This juxtaposition contributes to an uneasy, eerie feeling of being somewhere where one should not be.And now, a series of quotes: “The weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’” (Fisher 2016: 10-11).“A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved?” (Fisher 2016: 11).“There is no inside except as a holding of the outside; the mirror cracks, I am an other, and I always was. The shudder here is the shudder of the eerie . . . why is there something here when there should be nothing?” (Fisher 2016: 11-12).Mark Fisher’s writing echoes in my head as I walk through this desolate metal mausoleum of twisted struts. Although plant life could be seen on the other side of that glass, I could see that they were in tormented anguish. Yes, these plants were alive, but they were also encased within a great tomb.The plants press against the glass in Herzogian agony. Gaze upon what the colonist hath wrought! A microcosm of the land on which this building sits—the land we have violently and unequally divided and partitioned. Pain is put on display. The pus-colored mucus of these prisoners—unable to grow any larger—smears the glass. I reluctantly move on.The innocuous interior of Biosphere 2 is shocking in its normality. If one awoke here, they would feel as though they were in an office building, or a forlorn, substandard hotel built upon the edge of some highway in middle America. Only the windows prod us with a sad reminder of utopian futurity—”We are shaped as diamonds, traveler! We meant something once! We could mean something again…”Inside the hydroponic plant growth chamber of the Prototype Lunar Greenhouse, a variety of plants and crops are grown under the false sun of jaundiced lamplight. Do the plants know they exist inside of a futuristic simulacrum? Their roots feel soil, but do they realize it’s not the Earth?Ethnographic Texture I. The rusted, corregated underbelly of utopian architecture. The materiality of Biosphere 2 mimics its initial radical potential; beneath the promising veneer lies the rot of co-opted reality.Ethnographic Texture II. The choked waters of the ocean biosphere exists in painful imprisonment behind panes of glass. Its emaciated waters are oxygenated with a plume of air forming a bubbling, pale tower that rises steadily to the surface.
References
Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.
footnotes 