Water Table

URBAN LAND COVER AND WETLANDS OF CHARLESTON,

The 2004 Places with a Future program of the Spoleto Festival USA presented Water Table, a living sculpture comprised of over 3000 Carolina Gold rice plants, the most important local heritage strain. Taking the form of a huge raised platform, an open greenhouse and rice paddy, the installation was flanked by a monumental map of the wetlands, the defining landform of the Carolina Lowcountry and the source of Charleston's historic wealth. As both avant gardening and speculative urbanism,Water Table was also a meditation on the changes that will transform the Memminger District, one of the very few neighborhoods to have resisted complete gentrification in downtown historic Charleston.

Places with a Future is an initiative undertaken by The Spoleto Festival USA in reaction to rapidly increasing development in the Carolina Lowcountry that is impacting the cultural and natural ecosystems, and threatening their future sustainability. This program posits that art—as an experimental, interdisciplinary mode of practice—can aid in looking at current-day conditions, asking:

Can art-making be a tool to envision the future?

This experimental laboratory also signaled viewers to gather at the table for community dialogue as the site-specific installation became the site for many community events and conversations including:

• Welcoming the Rice—a children’s program for Memminger students
• Opening Program— rice stories from various sectors of the community
• Tending the Rice—daily gardening and conversations with the artists
• Table Talk—interviews conducted by Kendra Hamilton as a public forum
• Reflecting on Mapping and Public Projections—evening films and still projections exploring locales in the region.

At the conclusion of the festival the rice plants were distributed to public historic sites, community gardens, and schools—including Memminger School, where the rice supported science and environmental education for summer 2004.

Places with a Future continued in 2005 onward as part of the Spoleto Festival’s ongoing Evoking History program. collaborating in 2005 with The Phillips Community. Located north of Charleston, this rural area is home to nearly 600 residents: direct descendents of freed blacks—farmers and businessmen—who came together in 1878 to purchase the land in ten-acre tracts. Phillips is also significant as a center of sweetgrass basketmaking, a West African tradition developed locally during the colonial period. As a laboratory on regional transformation, the community members and the artists will explore questions around sustainable regional growth in the future while respecting the past.

In 2007, Whitehead also proposed The Diaspora Garden at the downtown Campbell residence known as The Borough Houses. Working in collaboration with Drayton Hall Historic Trust and the Clemson Architecture Center. The Diaspora Garden was never realized.