Unceded   

Unceded is a series of interventions that follow the route of the Dakota Access Pipeline and reveal how its contentious existence has inflicted social and environmental grief. The project takes an activist role by singling out acts of dominance embedded in the pipeline’s controversial history.

Through the theme of atonement, the project aims to first expose the pipeline’s invisible components, including oil industry malpractices, the resulting environmental degradation, infringement of land ownership and violation of water rights.

The project reimagines a range of future possibilities incorporating the existing hidden practices and infrastructure. Collectively, the sites tell the past, current and potential future of this linear landscape.

fluid geographies, fall 2018 
Kees Lokman

in collaboration with Jasmine Cress, Tatiana Nozaki

📎 published
Sitelines Magazine 
Scenario Journal

The Dakota Access Pipeline, completed in 2017, is a 1,172-mile-long underground oil pipeline that begins in the Bakken Shale Oil formation in northwest North Dakota and travels through South Dakota and Iowa to an oil terminal near Patoka, Illinois. This linear landscape passes through fracking and oil extraction sites, rivers crossings, and unceded territories in close proximity to Native American Reserves, prairie lands, and agricultural fields.




︎Closeups from the larger DAPL map to the right.

Black Snake looks at the point at which the pipeline crosses the unceded Sioux land, north of the Standing Rock Reservation. Here, History has constantly repeated itself as colonizers have often used this land without consent from Native Americans despite the 1851 Treaty of Laramie. A physical threshold of a curtain physically manifests the border between ceded and unceded territory. The curtain is permeable much like the Treaty.




Right to Roam seeks to reframe the way land ownership is considered. 99.98% of the DAPL passes through privately owned land, with a great majority being farmland. In cases in which landowners did not agree to lease their, it was taken through eminent domain. Right to Roam is a path along the pipeline easement, a 100-foot-wide zone in which nothing can be built or grown beyond herbaceous plants. Here, walkers are encouraged to occupy the same space that oil companies were given to transport their product. Roaming along the path of the pipeline is both an act of recreation and activism. The path is meant to endure beyond the lifespan of the pipeline.




Wallows memorializes habitat fragmentation. Before the rise of human settlement and the construction of linear infrastructure that fragment habitats, bison once roamed free in the Midwest - drinking, bathing, and rolling in naturally occurring shallow water holes known as wallows. Wallows eventually became larger impermeable basins, a trademark of the prairie landscape. This intervention proposes reflecting pools set into the ground corresponding to bison migration patterns. The whole length of the pipeline easement is planted with native prairie grasses and flowers to restore some of the prairie habitat lost.




︎Concrete, wax, and birch models of the nine interventions along the Dakota access pipeline.