Sited in Bayou Tortillon, a vast swamp region in southern Louisiana, the project imagines a partly submerged world, inhabited by low-tech, hydro-engineered infrastructures and peculiar humanlike scavengers called ‘Lossans’.

Acting in response to the mythic power of this changing American landscape, Mary orchestrates a range of time-based behavioural operations within this threatened landscape. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’, JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, an ambitious magical realist intervention emerges, that is part poem, part architecture.

A pair of ‘spirits’ are imagined as cavernous inhabitable structures that relate to ancient mythological orders and are able to straddle our middle world and the spirit realm of the water. The creatures are intended as ambiguous pieces of infrastructure operating outside of human time perception and capable of healing, yet with an unpredictable and potentially destructive behaviour. Slippery interior worlds of mysterious organ-like forms give way to large animalistic exteriors with strange plasto-reptilian skins that then pass slowly into the swamp itself.

Employing a mythopoetic methodology for designing a site specific architecture through the creation of a fiction based on the site's mythical past, the project is intended as a critique on current short-term responses to climate emergency architecture.