The Ephemeralization Project is an ongoing series of site-specific community arts events launched in Broad Cove, Nova Scotia on August 29, 2023. Designed to highlight the vital and reciprocal relation between art-making and world-making, each iteration of the project creates the conditions for further reflection on the intersections between language, the imagination, and the physical and material world both draw from and inform.

The project borrows its name and some of its driving concerns from architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller who, in 1969, argued that even as exponential population growth guaranteed increased consumption of the world’s resources, advances in technology would lead to increased “ephemeralization”:  “the doing of ever more with ever less.” A future of “truly sustainable” rapid industrial development seemed, to Fuller, to be within our grasp.

Over fifty years later, we propose art-making and the deep and close-reading of the world it inspires as sustainable resources fundamental to building new pathways for action and thought. Our aim is to promote an ephemeral form of earth accountability fundamentally resistant to the rhetoric of control and mechanizations of capitalism while, at the same time, drawing attention to the material structures—and both the human and more-than-human bodies—that undergird even the most apparently “ephemeral” developments in the history of industrialization.

Through collective engagement with specific environments, a range of both natural resources and human-produced waste materials, Buckminster Fuller’s project: “the doing of ever more with ever less, per given resource units of pounds, time, and living in ever-increasing numbers” will be activated in a poetic mode that underscores art practice as a way of recognizing and celebrating these site-specific and time-bound—fleeting—but also endlessly renewable resources: perspective, community, and the human imagination.