Collaborative Post-Apocolyptic Utopianism

The Odyssey Panorama emerged in 2009 while I was completing my MFA at the University of Saskatchewan and continuing my long‑term collaboration with Tony Romano as T&T. This project offered a moment to reflect on the conceptual terrain we had been developing for over a decade, situating our practice within a broader history of speculative architecture. From the radical proposals of Archigram and Superstudio in the 1960s to the post‑industrial assemblages of Kim Adams and the adaptive, small‑scale infrastructures explored by collectives such as N55, these movements established a lineage in which architecture becomes a tool for imagining alternative forms of social organization. The Odyssey Panorama attempts to exist somewhere adjacent to this lineage through a series of vector‑based panoramic drawings that reimagine immobilized freight trains—boxcars, tankers, a locomotive, and a caboose—as stationary enclaves where new modes of living begin to take shape.

The railway, often framed as a symbol of national unity, is approached here as an infrastructure marked by displacement. In the drawings, trains are halted either by winter accumulation or by the abrupt disappearance of the tracks beneath them. These “end‑of‑the‑line” conditions—one produced by natural forces, the other by human erasure—become metaphors for systems that have ceased to carry us forward. Snowdrifts bury the machinery of the past, transforming the cars into semi‑subterranean shelters adapted to support horticultural spaces. In summer scenes, perfect blue skies contrast with the unease of severed rails, suggesting a future suspended between clarity and uncertainty.

The freight cars are rendered in bold, carnivalesque colors, their brightness echoing the vibrancy and signalling of the inhabitants’ clothing. These women and gender neutral figures engage in forms of collective labor—laying cobblestones, harvesting rainwater, operating hand‑pump rail‑cars—that evoke small‑scale, improvised infrastructures. As with the work of T&T, the drawings borrow the flattened, diagrammatic language of architectural plans, creating a tension between precision and speculative tenderness. The world depicted is neither utopian nor dystopian: the collapse of supply chains and the absence of industrial conveniences demand forms of self‑sufficiency that are both liberating and precarious. Sparse populations and open landscapes raise questions about who remains, who has left, and whether these enclaves represent remnants or beginnings.

Throughout the panoramas, snow, emptiness, and the literal end of the tracks operate as metaphors for possibility. They clear space for new social forms to emerge—collaborative, resourceful, and grounded in shared maintenance rather than abundance. These themes continue to resonate within my ongoing work as T&T, where speculative architectures serve as a means of imagining how communities might reorganize themselves in the wake of systemic collapse. While producing this series, I returned often to Jim O’Rourke’s Prelude to 110 or 220/Women of the World, whose looping refrain—hopeful, weary, and defiant—mirrors the slow, persistent insistence of the worlds depicted here: that transformation may be improvised, collective, and quietly unfolding beneath the surface.