Waste Wilderness: Timonium Nature Walk was recently profiled in the latest issue of Acres, a magazine curated by Danielle Criqui and Jasmine Sarp. The piece consisted of two collages made especially for Acres, and a short interview. You can buy all four issues of Acres on their website, or from Normal’s in Baltimore and Ooga Booga in LA.

The collages include photos by several people who have gone on the nature walk: Jacob Kenna, Jane Vincent, and Danielle Criqui.

Here’s the interview I did with Danielle:

This past New Year’s Eve in the hours before the pre-party anticipation, I caught a northbound Light Rail with Nick Vyssotsky to embark on his ongoing project Waste Wilderness Timonium Nature Walk. We trekked the outskirts of strip malls and industrial business parks, crossed trash strewn creeks, and toppled metal fences... As two people who had grown up in Suburban America, In these last bits of sunlight of 2016, we felt right at home.

Danielle : On our walk we talked about how when growing up in the suburbs you can sometimes find yourself feeling a personal attachment to the corporations and chains that populate the miles of strip malls around you - "that was MY McDonalds", "that was MY Target". And how It is yours because the graffiti on the dumpster at Panera was your friends tag, and while being 16 and having nowhere else to go after midnight - the Waffle House parking lot was your  spot. But then as you get older and see more of the world outside your bubble, you meet other people that did the exact same thing at the exact same chain, but just in a different town. So in a way to me the project is about trying to grapple with the humanity of these cloned spaces. Trying to find traces of the people that made it theirs, or left it behind.

Nick: One thing that is definitely integral to the Waste Wilderness Timonium Nature Walk project is the concept of wandering and trespassing that I feel was at least personally so commonplace in my Teenage experience. A large part of my time in middle school/high school was spent purposefully occupying areas that I guess could be considered grey spaces of ownership, because those spaces made the best areas to engage in activities that are deemed illicit for that age range. I'm talking about the wooded areas between developments, abandoned industrial zones, drainage ditches, parks after hours, the access alleys behind shopping malls, were generally the most convenient places to skate, get high, hook up, break stuff, or just hang out. These spaces are taken for granted once you "grow up" because you're afforded your own environment to engage in these activities. To a certain extent Nowhere Zone/Waste Wilderness is about trying to re-engage with that kind of pre-adult mind set. I think this is basically why ownership of spaces is so important as a teen, like a place being Your McDonalds or Your tag, Your hang-out spot etc., because as a teenager you're in this arrested development of not being a 'child' but also not having the agency that 'adults' are granted as far as space goes, that makes any personal stake upon the world you can create so much more important.

Danielle: Since living in a city for the past decade, when I visit suburban spaces now, I often think about what they could be repurposed as in the not too distant future. It seems as our countries income inequality widens, the poor are getting priced out of cities and having to move to these more sprawling spaces... While the rich are trading in suburbia for the metropolitan life, the old discos are getting turned into CVS's (like The Hippo on Eager and Charles St), and the abandoned factories are being gutted to become luxury condos. It's all getting flipped. What do you see happening to these left behind spaces you explore in Nowhere Zone in the future?

Nick: I think by and large those spaces will stay the same despite this shift in demographic. Spaces of refuge such as the ones explored in the Nature Walk are inherent in any environment which functions through othering parts of its population, and when I say this I extend this not just to teens but to people people more severely excluded from the environment they find themselves embedded in.

On a related topic I find it interesting the sense of invisibility some people have noted while on the Walk, that despite being in these spaces that have a sort of gray area of ownership, people around them don't regard them at all. It makes me wonder if a pedestrian in an environment that is populated overwhelmingly by people in cars isn't worth acknowledging.

The detriment to this flip you mentioned is that as underprivileged people are priced out of cities, they're forced into an environment that is by and large inherently unsustainable to pedestrian transit and usually has a really shitty public transportation system. Artists are generally seen as being the gatekeepers to gentrification, so I think an important thing to keep in mind as an artist is the way in which we can help keep roadblocks in place to keep developers from pricing out whole neighborhoods. Earlier this week I went to an event organized by Current Space and Le Mondo which featured a brief talk with Burt Cranca, the founder of AS220 in Providence, who spoke about sustainable artist communities. Not sustainable within the context of ecology but within the context of creating spaces that resist existing as stepping stones for developers to white wash neighborhoods into bland stucco prefab clusterfucks. That being said, I do have very romantic thoughts about closed down shopping malls like Owings Mills or any of the half dead malls that line Baltimore being converted into large scale artist enclaves.

Part of what I think makes the Nature Walk appealing to people is it's a kind of venture outside of one's familiar surroundings into an environment people in Baltimore have an awareness of but don't necessarily confront on a regular basis. Corporate controlled suburban spaces are alien and thereby easy to exoticize for people used to the city.

In our email correspondence you brought up the Dérive strategy which is definitely applicable to the Nature Walk, although it doesn't really originate consciously from such an intellectual starting point. I initially became familiar with the area in which the Nature Walk takes place because there are both a Jo Ann Fabric and a Lowe's (and a Taco Bell) that are easily accessible from the Light Rail. I came upon the sites visited in the Nature Walk because I got bored sticking to the sidewalk, or because I preferred taking the direct route to get from one place to another, and figured it'd be more interesting to cut through underbrush than to walk down a strip of drab car dealerships and strip malls, which I guess in its own way is the purest application of Dérive, an unconscious willingness to subvert the structure of an environment.