︎ COLLEEN TUITE ︎
Colleen Tuite is a designer who writes about architecture and nature.

She is the Director of Design & Production at Studio Sanford Biggers.
Personal & collaborative work is archived below.

colleen@dark-green.net
Crude: The Bakken Fossil Fuel Frontier
North Dakota, USA
In 2015, the story was this: a massive migration to the post-peak-oil frontier, recession-proof, $20/hr McDonald’s jobs, and gas flares that can be seen from space. We kept hearing about it, reading occasional news clips, and soon enough we were watching YouTube videos about how to get jobs in the oil patch, how to live in a man camp, how to live out of your truck in a Wal-Mart parking lot until you could get a job and score a spot in a man camp; videos of exploding gas well heads, eighteen-wheelers flipped over in pristine snowbanks. All in the endless landscape of the Bakken Formation in North Dakota. 

We decided we’d go too.

Published in Atlas of Material Worlds: Mapping the Agency of Matter for a New Landscape Practice, edited by Matthew Seibert (Routledge, 2021)

And as “Tight Gas” in Manifest: A Journal of the Americas issue 3.

Together with Ian Quate/ Other Fields
Big Oil Archive
I interviewed artist Sanaz Sohrabi about her work with the British Petroleum archive and the world’s oldest obsession. 

Montez Press Radio
Airing Sept 25, 2020

Produced with Discrit’s programming series. 
Panning
Pan is the chillest Greek dude. While everyone else is in the temple, Pan’s holding it down in the woods, hosting epic parties, making sure everyone’s goblet is full, and getting laid. He’s enjoying the pre-industrial night air, cracking jokes, and jamming on his flute. But sometimes, all his friends go home. Sometimes, Pan wakes up in the morning, alone in the forest – confused, hungover, depressed – and he cries out. “Panic.”

One panics when they feel lost and confused in nature.

Published in Avery Shorts Season 3, 2019

Full Text

Slideshow presented at Datatopia, Berlin, Germany, summer 2018.
20/20
Newburgh, NY
Moving through a house like hiking up a mountain. Through the musty undergrowth to the sun shining bright symbols above, designated danger marked on a butterfly’s wing.

In Newburgh, a city which has faced economic austerity and abandonment, many of the historic facades now bear a red X - a graphic indication of structural danger and visual reminder of poverty.

20/20 renders Newburgh's ubiquitous red X into natural phenomena.


Light box with vinyl transparency, 2019.

Exhibited in “Terrain Biennial”, Newburgh NY

Photography by Michael Vahrenwald