Field Season One: May 2025
Field Report Notice
The Bureau of Operational Landscapes circulates field reports as temporary dispatches. Each season is published for a limited duration and then withdrawn. This archive consolidates those materials as part of an ongoing record of infrastructural sites and public encounters.
Field Season 1 took place in Trenčín, Slovakia from May 17—31, 2025 and comprises 14 field reports. The visit functioned as an initial survey of the disused industrial rail bridge and its surrounding terrain. The reports document first observations, site walks, and preliminary photographic work undertaken during that period.
May 24, 2025
Today I met with the city architect, and was met with the inevitable “no.” No, not possible. No, that is under control of the Department of Roads and Bridges. No, that is the domain of the Conservation Bureau or Flood Management. No, that is owned by an absent landlord who has disappeared to Portugal or somewhere and is letting his buildings decay. He is jerk (my analysis, not the architect’s).
I had a dream that this could be the Bureau’s provisional HQ. But no.
But I like “no.” No means that the picture is coming into focus. A series of no’s reveals its hidden opposition, the much more friendlier yet elusive “yes.” Yes is the portal where ideas leave their abstract state and become practical actions.
So now I start to have a semblance of a plan, a form that begins to find itself in the real world, in physical space, outside my own (mis)-conceptions and grand dreams. I have never been one for the speculative, as this is purely something that exists in a state where the outcome refuses the heavy burden of gravity. That is, since it’s speculative, rules can constantly be shaped and re-shaped, endlessly mutable and free from the resistance of the ordinary and everyday.
Dare I say it, but I kinda have a semblance of a plan.
I am circling around this idea in Trenċín that photography is more than just capture but about orientation. Let’s call it situational observation. I want to make a device for photographic thinking, what it means to look photographically.
This is why I met the city architect because I’d like to build a series of simple structures on either side of the river, an invitation to passersby to stop and look. Here, my little platform becomes an apparatus for perception, an encounter with the nameless distant bridge and (hopefully) transform it into a subject, a presence, a thing to be witnessed. What happens when we tune into infrastructural conditions, however briefly? I see my viewing platform as a shared ethical space opened up by the act of seeing.
I wandered the rail yards and took some photos of the weird little structures and apparatuses that grease the flow of rail traffic. Odd little towers and switches and boxes, lazily painted in stripes and yellow markings.
Architectural form
These reminded me of the architect John Hejduk’s architectural follies, strange little creatures that asked people to slow down, attend, and consider space as a site of encounter and not efficiency. They are provisional and ambiguous, structures that were meant to be read and imagined into.
John Hejduk’s House for a Poet
From there I ventured into El Lissitzky’s Lenin Tribune from 1920, an incredible multi-level speaking platform that is an architecture of spatial performance. Here the crowd’s gaze is directed, politics becomes visible.
El Lissizky, Lenin Tribune.
So, now my little sketches, born out of “no”, might just hopefully occupy that space of “yes.”
Don't judge!