The fourteen months since the first COVID-19 lockdowns have made clear over and over again just how entangled environmental damage, capitalism, and white supremacy actually are – as well as how unevenly their burdens are experienced. Even as I receive my second vaccine shot this week, I look with grief and outrage at the attacks on civilians in Palestine and the conditions facing the people of India, Brazil, Uruguay and other countries whose ability to fight the virus is constrained by the vaccine nationalism of wealthy countries. So it’s with open but aching arms that I embrace the promise of spring in my hemisphere and with it the release of new writing and creative work.
On Saturday, May 15, the geolocated public audio walk Sound on Mystic launches and with it my latest collaboration with Elizabeth Solomon. Native Space: Headwaters and Homelands is a five and a half minute piece for the area of the cistern that drains water from lower Mystic Lake into a now-defunct water distribution system. Elizabeth takes us back to an earlier view of Mystic Lake, before its engineering and development, to the time of a powerful female leader of the Massachusett people known today only as the Saunkswa of Missitekw. The piece is built from an interview with Elizabeth and field recordings collected inside the cistern and along the Mystic River.
I’m thrilled to announce that the short film (and earlier collaboration with Elizabeth Solomon and Nicholas Brown) Ecologies of Acknowledgment will screen in the 2021 Roxbury International Film Festival in a program entitled “Homage to our Lands.” Despite recent progress with vaccinations – especially in Boston, the film festival is online for the again this year. The program will be available for streaming for 48 hours, from 10am on Juneteenth (the 19th) to 10am on June 21st. Since I made the film viewable online for free on Indigenous People’s Day 2019, it has been circulating in unpredictable ways that sometimes surface via Instagram or Twitter and a number of gratifying unsolicited emails. It is still viewable in person at the Tufts University Art Gallery through the end of the spring semester.
This winter and spring has seen the publication of two new academic essays co-authored with Nicholas Brown. Our just-published “Perspectives and Controversies” essay for The Anthropocene Review entitled “An Anti-Racist and Anti-Colonial Anthropocene for Compromised Times.” Written during the racial justice uprising of last summer, we argue that the post-definitional project of the Anthropocene must be humbly anti-racist and anti-colonial and committed to transformative action. Over the winter, our essay “Common Tensions” was published in a special issue of the Swedish art journal Passepartout on “New Infrastructures – Performative Infrastructures in the Performance Field.”
I’m also honored to have an essay in the new Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited by T.J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee. “Staying with the Troubling, Performing in the Impasse” takes a skeptical look at white/settler climate grief and looks towards AIDS activists ability to politicize grief to consider how such an affect might be mobilized toward justice in both art and organizing. It is an incredible privilege to have my written work appear alongside that of many of my all-time intellectual, artistic and political heroes, and a huge thank you to the editors to shepherding the many year process through to completion.
The Netherlands-based arts research organization Sonic Acts has launched the new magazine Ecoes about art in the age of pollution. A few months ago, I sat down (virtually) with Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou for a conversation about the National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service and other projects about the nuclear legacies of the Cold War. An edited version of the interview appears in the magazine’s inaugural issue, just out this month.
I recently also had the privilege of screening and speaking with Emily Eliza Scott about my 2012 film Around Crab Orchard in the University of Oregon’s Emerald Earth Film Festival, speaking with Jules Rochielle’s Tufts University class Public as Form, and leading a socially distanced tour of the grounds outside the perimeter of the MWRA Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant with Nicholas Brown for Caroline Jones’s MIT Architecture course, Landscape Experience (see picture above). The tour was a welcome return to a place we’ve spent a lot of time at and thinking about over the years, from helping with the Deer Island Memorial Paddle to researching and filming Ecologies of Acknowledgment, and the tour gave us an excuse to put together a one-page zine of questions to guide our visit which you can download here. For printing and folding directions, you can see this tutorial.