This research explores the hauntings of colonization in San Nicolas, Aruba, through a hauntological approach. Once thriving through the oil refinery and now rebranded as the “Sunrise City,” San Nicolas is caught in a temporal disjunction where past, present, and future are entangled. As the refinery will be dismantled—another colonial act of erasure—Aruba attempts to move forward through forgetting rather than confronting what persists.
Situated within an ethico-onto-epistemological framework, this research proposes response-ability as a way of engaging with these hauntings. Rather than erasing the past, it calls for acknowledging and working with the specters—reclaiming marginalized and forgotten (future) memories. In doing so, it aims to understand how hauntology can foster response-ability towards the ongoing injustices of colonization. How do fucus (specters) haunt the material and immaterial flows of disturbed sites? What affects do they produce? How can we reveal and revalue these fucus haunting disturbed sites to produce new modes of ethopoietic co-habitation? How can architecture ground itself into the assemblage of a San Nicolas yet-to-come?
The echoes of the fucus are followed through archival maps, images, and fieldwork photography, observations, and embodied attention. The researcher moves as both witness and participant, attuned to what the site reveals and what it conceals.
Central to this research are the fucus: active, affective forces that haunt both the material and immaterial conditions of the city. They are not metaphors, but expressions of unresolved colonial violence, repressed memories, and unrealized futures that continue to shape the present. These hauntings are explored through the refinery wall as a medium of encounter, approached through three lenses: matter, perception, and limits.
The refinery wall becomes a medium: a site to conjure and encounter the fucus. The wall is explored through three lenses. First, the wall as matter: what shifting materiality, its forces, its memory does. Second, the wall as perception: how it is seen, felt, experienced. Third, the wall as limits: what is erased and how they haunt. Each lens amplifies spectral, temporal, and ethical forces. They produce clues toward response-ability — toward architectures that acknowledge, regenerate, and transform. As witness and participant, the researcher becomes attentive to what the wall reveals, and to what it hides.
Through this encounter, the site informs design logics grounded in the material, social, and affective assemblage of San Nicolas, contributing to an architectural practice attuned to the yet-to-come.