Willow Project

by Avery Nielsen-Webb

“This project adopts the name “Willow Project” from the Trump policy proposing expanded oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Using Google 3D satellite imagery to depict the landscape as a system of crunched data points. A bunch of ones and zeros in an Excel spreadsheet from a suited man thousands of miles away. Injected into these landscapes are models, whose bodies function as fantasies to the gaze. Something to be consumed and fetishized. Their bodies are marked with scars of the Alaskan pipelines that are currently upon the landscape. These pipelines spill at least 2,000 times per year and, in the worst cases, have leaked 53 million gallons of oil taking 30 years to clean up. At its core, the project interrogates a corporate fantasy: a worldview in which the Arctic is not a living ecosystem, but an abstract site of consumption. The land becomes a target, a mode of seeing where everything is flattened into value.”