The Project: Create a narrative, media outreach campaign, and festival submission strategy around the launch of Loa’s Promise, a short film from designer and filmmaker Joshua Ashish Dawson. Film had its online premiere on Motherboard (Vice) and screened at multiple film festivals, including Cinequest, where it won a Jury Award.
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Acclaimed Speculative Architect Creates Urgent Vision of Chile’s Arid Future with Loa’s Promise
Joshua Dawson pushes the boundaries of speculative design fiction to bring home the reality of water shortages, resource depletion, and the impermanence of built infrastructure.
LOS ANGELES, CA, March 14, 2018 — Speculative architect Joshua Dawson has released his latest project, Loa’s Promise, a seven-minute film that draws the audience into the brave new world of the near-future, raising unsettling questions. The film uses realistic renderings of futuristic technology that blend seamlessly with Dawson’s footage of real-life ghost towns, illustrating the logical outcome of our current attitudes toward water and other natural resources. Filmed on location in the Atacama Desert in Chile, Loa’s Promise highlights predicaments that could — and do — affect people anywhere and everywhere.
And that, for Dawson, is exactly the point.
“This issue scales,” says Dawson. “Issues that affect a town of 150 people in the middle of the desert are the very same as those that affect a city like Lagos, Cape Town, or Los Angeles.” Indeed, his project seems almost prescient, as cities like Cape Town face severe water shortages, and corporations privatize water resources around the world.
The film moves from the abstract to the all-too-real, presenting audiences with vast ghost towns to show what’s at stake. Through composites of visual effects and footage shot on location, buildings and structures take center stage as characters in Dawson’s narrative. Loa’s Promise incorporates a unique combination of influences from his former mentors, architect BV Doshi (winner of the 2018 Pritzker Prize) and film designer Alex McDowell (Fight Club, Minority Report), where the former’s stance on architecture’s social agenda is articulated through the latter’s world-building methodology.
“I’ve always been really interested in the relationship between water and the built environment,” Dawson explains. “Water-stressed environments are almost always the result of an infrastructure problem.” Nowhere is that more clear than in Chile, where mining has transformed the landscape. Dawson first learned about the issue when he heard about the oasis town of Quillagua: unable to rely on the Loa River because of pollution and over-extraction from the copper mines, they had to ship in their water from other sources.
“The thought of these people being forced to leave their lives and homes behind because a mining company stole their water played on my mind.” Dawson received a travel grant to investigate, and he headed to Quillagua, the world’s driest town, only to discover that there were just three homes still inhabited. “Everyone sold their water rights and left. A few families held on as a form of protest.”
By depleting the river, resource extraction destroyed previously robust towns, and for Dawson, as an architect, that struck a chord.
“Architects believe that their buildings will function as intended forever, but this film shows that this isn’t necessarily true. It sheds light on the unfortunate impermanence of architecture and the role that water plays in shaping our environment.”
Chile is an extreme case, in that almost all urban water companies are privately owned or operated, and the country’s economic model limits corporate regulation, but other countries are starting to face many of the same problems.
We ignore the reality of dwindling water supplies at our peril. Technological advancements can transform our world, but everything comes at a cost. Dawson wants us to realize that.
“The project, like my previous film Cáustico, takes the form of a cautionary tale that is meant to provoke activism and critique. The only reason I ever wanted to be an architect was to try and shape the world around me. It’s important to start engaging in meaningful conversations around environmental and social issues.”
He isn’t about to let the world burn without a fight.
Watch Loa’s Promise: https://vimeo.com/259578301
About Loa’s Promise:
Chile has had a tumultuous political and economic history. After dictator Augusto Pinochet’s reign ended in 1990, the country adopted a market-based allocation system for water, relinquishing state oversight and allowing corporations to take control. Over the years, thriving industries began to monopolize the resources in the mineral-rich Atacama Desert in order to fuel their economic expansion. In combination with excessive mining activity, this has led to drought and the contamination of watercourses in local communities, including in the Loa Province. Just as the nitrate and copper mining towns in the desert were abandoned post-mineral extraction, the oasis town of Quillagua, reliant on the depleted and polluted Loa River, now faces a similar fate…
Loa’s Promise envisions the outcome of this situation, presenting an alternate history and hypothetical future, where the desert’s abandoned nitrate towns have been retrofitted as data centers and digital mines, to efface troubled memories. Arid and abandoned, Chacabuco (formerly a concentration camp under Pinochet) and other ghost towns take on a new purpose, the quiet hum of technology drowning out the echoes of the past. By portraying the endangered town of Quillagua as threaded to a network of the region’s ghost towns, the film aims to raise awareness of the consequences of deregulated resource extraction in free-market economies like Chile — consequences that could soon affect much of the world.
About Joshua Dawson:
Joshua Ashish Dawson is a Los Angeles-based speculative architect working at the intersection of architecture and fiction. He received a post-professional Master’s degree in Advanced Architectural Studies with honors from the University of Southern California, where he was the recipient of the S. Kenneth Johnson Memorial Scholarship and a Gesundheit travelling fellow. His Master’s thesis project was advised by Alex McDowell, Wes Jones, and Golden Globe-nominated filmmaker Shekhar Kapur. Joshua first received national recognition at the age of 18 in renowned architectural publications for his project titled the ‘Bamboo Habitat’ and has since been widely published and exhibited. He has received acclaim from mainstream architectural media, including ArchDaily, Designboom, Design Indaba and Domus Magazine. His work was screened by the Garden of Australian Dreams at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.
Joshua trained under famed Indian Architect Balkrishna Doshi, winner of the 2018 Pritzker Prize, on the extension to Le Corbusier’s Villa Shodhan and under Hollywood production designer Alex McDowell in the practice of world-building. This unique combination of influences has led Joshua to re-imagine the built environment through interdisciplinary design thinking and cinematic visualization.
For more information, visit joshua-dawson.com.
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