Lorel Hill is an artist from northern New Jersey, known for its highway ramps, swamps and general pollutedness. He chooses this landscape as a starting point, imagining possibilities where nature and industry collide.

His current series is based around a fictional real estate development company: PoND Ventures LLC (Power of Natural Degeneration), which takes inspiration from real abandoned sites and proposes how they could integrate urban and natural systems. Pictured here is the fictional Jersey City Civ-Eco Center, based on the abandoned site at 125 Monitor Street in Jersey City.

Hill blends real research on overlooked local history and combines  it with his worldbuilding process. In response to a feeling of powerlessness over urban space, the work satirizes what it could mean for institutions to address historically neglected spaces. When a city land title becomes tied up in legal limbo, the actual land often becomes a hub for other species and vibrant subcultures, from foxes to graffiti artists. Rather than ignore these worlds, why not organize their cohabitation?

In Berlin, Hill will develop diorama scenes of the fictional Berlin Urban Wildlife Safari, based on an  abandoned hospital in the Weisensee neighborhood, like a zoo for urban explorers. His open studios will be modelled as the gift shop of this fantasy attraction.