Description Without Place: Searching for Centralia
by Michael Serra
portfolio shortlisted call 'URBANAUTICA INSTITUTE AWARDS 2022', 2022
Category: People and Communities
Description Without Place: Searching for Centralia (2009-2019), is a meditation on the problem of representing the former borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, a small former anthracite coal mining town in the Anthracite Coal Region of Pennsylvania, under which a mine fire has been burning, unabated, since 1962. Using the poetry of Wallace Stevens to guide me, I've constructed an analogous image of what this town of once 1,100 residents may have looked like. By so doing, I repeat and perform a process of realization and fabulation that comprises both storytelling and myth.