Hardscrabble
Hardscrabble presented four ongoing projects exploring sites in the inland west of the United States, each related to an actual or proposed model of alternative education. These included an experimental mapping of the Purgatoire River drainage, home of Drop City, a short-lived experimental community founded in 1965 in southern Colorado; a thought experiment about a text-based earthwork near Huerfano Butte, Colorado, on a now-privatized square mile of land initially designated for the support of public education; a proposed donation to a volunteer-run library in Slab City, an ad hoc autonomous zone located on an abandoned military base in Imperial County, California; and a prototype cinema built around footage of the August 21, 2017 eclipse, as the umbra passed over the deepest point of the Ogallala Aquifer, in the Nebraska Sandhills.
