Echo Archive — martharsteele.baby

Echo Archive is a long-term digital and audiovisual archive of industrial waterways across Turtle Island, supported by the Ontario Arts Council. The project traces how extractivism, environmental degradation, and queer labour flow through water systems, transcending colonial borders. At its core is the use of down-scan sonar imaging—a technology rooted in the military-industrial complex—subverted to visualize submerged histories. The use of bathymetry in Echo Archive negotiates the technology’s paradoxical value as both weapon and tool, becoming a mediator between the body and toxic land. How do we connect with land that has become dangerous to our (human and non-human) bodies?

Echo Archive: Gowanus Lab is the first iteration in this project, developed through the 11-week Fall 2025 Fellowship at the Institute for Public Architecture on Governors Island, New York City. This installation is a semi-fictional, hybrid lab containing both empirical findings and speculative imaginations about the Gowanus Canal, a noxious industrial NYC brownfield currently undergoing a $1.6 billion remediation project. The indoor lab presents down-scan sonar imaging footage, a posthuman resident of the canal, fluorescent water samples, microscopic images, a spreadsheet, and a speculative queer photo archive. This research was done in collaboration with the Billion Oyster Project and the Gowanus Dredgers. The indoor lab is fed by an umbilical cord running outside via a window, connecting to Gowanus Synergy Chorus. Echo Archive: Gowanus Lab sutures and situates these complex systems and circuits as an interconnected mass: an exquisite corps. In Echo Archive: Gowanus Lab, Echo Archive becomes a body and space of possibility.