Project by Michael K Chan
For thousands of years, the vault of frost beneath the Alaskan land held memory in suspension. Permafrost—once the quiet anchor of Yup’ik life—kept homes steady, food preserved, stories grounded. But the seal is broken. Heat burrows where cold once ruled. Ice turns liquid, sinking paths and dissolving the foundations of place.
Thermokarst blossoms like a wound; homes tilt; ice cellars drown. Homefinding becomes uncertain for all beings. Alaskan as displacer, beavers as settler, and salmon as returner.
Yet this is not a dying landscape, but a shifting one—demanding a new grammar of relations. Damage and opportunity collapse into one another as animals redraw rivers and people rethink dwelling. To inhabit this shifting world, the community builds the Drumming Weir, where pulses modeled on Yup’ik drum rhythms ripple through water—not as rituals only, but as guidance. In this emerging landscape, home is no longer fixed but a collective practice—a weaving of rhythms across land, water, animal, and human.
The device becomes a witness— an instrument for home-finding.
