New Year coming, tasks to tie up

‘If we can re-green the earth by 36%, we can survive global warming,’ - 2013 James White, paleoecologist, Fellow and Director of INSTAAR, University of Colorado at Boulder, on the occasion of Fish Story, Memphis, part of Memphis Social, curated by Tom McGlynn

However. Is 36% of the earth available to re-green and how?

“The earth was lost by increments, it can be restored by increments,” - 1997 Wendi Goldsmith,  CEO and founder of the Bioengineering Group with Aviva Rahmani, ecological artist, Affiliate, INSTAAR and researcher at the University of Plymouth, UK, on the occasion of completing bioengineering to restore the Ghost Nets salt marsh.

(Rahmani 2013)

In 1997, after several years of collaborative preparation, Goldsmith daylighted the Ghost Nets site: a "pocket (rocky intertidal) marsh," typical of the upper half of the Gulf of Maine. At some point, one of us said, "the environment was lost by increments. It can be restored by increments." Years later, after I had attributed that quote for years, to Wendi, I thought she said, no, "you said it." Then she corrected me, that she HAD said it.

I think the confusion arose because her quote was synchronous with my developing trigger point theory. The two ideas converge. Wendi had the part about increments of restoration. I have contributed the part of where and how we choose to target and prioritize those increments.

White has calculated how much restoration is required of us. It is also correct that, so far, we don't have enough places to restore to mitigate climate change. However, with as many people as now inhabit the globe, if everyone adds an increment that could be a trigger point, the impossible may become possible. At least, that is my holiday wish for the earth.

Connecting the RIver the Dots

I am pleased to share the public webcast from Fish Story Memphis from: May 11, 2013, “Connecting the River  Dots."Connecting the River Dots was performed with the artists Ruth Hardinger and Eve Andre Laramee, the curator Yvonne Senouf of MELD, Dr. Eugene Turner and myself from the Memphis College of Art, as part of Memphis Social.

Big Fish of Fish Story

The  NYC art world is responding to the bigness of two male artists making big & irrelevant artworks: Paul McCarthy and Jeff Koons dueling for attention. Of the 2, McCarthy is arguably a better artist. Both sell their works for many millions of dollars. The three galleries/ gallerists showing them, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner and Larry Gagosian sell to very big collectors, some of whom are using art to launder money. The art often gets stored in a warehouse as one more commodities investment without further aesthetic discussion.

What is "big" art in today's world? What are big ideas? I humbly submit that the biggest idea may be to simply stop doing what we have been doing: making many babies and consuming many planets to support all those extra people. The second big idea might be to put things back where we found them- like missing fish. Apparently, easier said than done.

So, what else's big? Perhaps, the enthusiasm and commitment and success I witnessed among the people I encountered in Memphis for a better environment,

Participatory map from playing the Anthropocene Game at Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN.,  May 6, 2013
as part of Fish Story, Memphis for Memphis Social

Fish Story Memphis generated 80 blog posts on this website since November 2012, with 9 911 views; 1 room size installation at the Memphis College of Art, Memphis, TN.; 1 9.5'x 28' painting on paper, almost 100 paper cut-outs of individual fish from 16 freshwater North American species; 7 13"x19" encaustic paintings on google map prints of the tributaries; 3 video tapes- 1 from a Pecha Kucha at Crosstown Arts Gallery in Memphis, TN. December 2012, 1 of a participatory mapping exercize after playing the Anthropocene Game at Crosstown Arts Gallery in May 2013 and 1 of a webcast between NYC, Memphis and Greece connecting river dots to radioactivity and fracking May 11,2013 ; 1 participatory map of what causes and cures environemntal degration; about 50 photographs of fish habitat and ecosystems taken on site in Memphis and on the Wolf River; 15 assessment evaluations and 1 hand-out, all to establish a basis to say that our world needs to pay attention to the story fish tell and pull together to save our common environment MORE than we need to extract energy to keep on the way we've been keeping on. That basis for change is the big fish I'm trying to land. I came away from Memphis happy to know that so many others are fishing in this new way.

Canoeing the Wolf RIver, Dr. Eugene Turner, guest blogger for Fish Story

The Canoes of the Memphis Social(s)

            A woman emerges from the darkened room, turns around to cast back a whispered ‘I love you, Bye!’, closes the door softly, and scampers off barefoot -- lightly thumping the wood floor -- gathers sandals, and zips downstairs and away. An old man smiles at the youth, the opportunity to care, and good use of precious time. The morning’s first restorative light spears glide across the room. Time to nourish oneself and get in motion.

            We are here as part of the Fish Story team for ‘Memphis Social’ that opens in two days. We have been reconnoitering the area, beginning with a canoe trip on the Wolf River May 4, then installing artwork for 5 days, giving one workshop at Crosstown Arts Gallery, and plan to attend the opening Friday night, and organize an international webinar on Saturday, May 11.

Dr. Eugene Turner and Aviva Rahmani with 8 guides from the Wolf River Conservancy

            The Wolf River cradles the southeast of Memphis, Tennessee. It drains the high ground above the present day Mississippi River, opposite the low ground of the present-day State of Arkansas. Ninety-five million years ago it debouched directly into the salty Mississippi Embayment, then an extension of the Gulf of Mexico. This was 60 million years before the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide concentrations dropped below 350 ppm, after which it was cool enough for ice sheets to form, and long before our human ancestors could exist as forest dwellers, which was about 6 to 8 million years ago. When sea level dropped because this global cooling, the embayment filled in with sediments to form the Mississippi delta lowlands. 

            Whap!...our canoe bumps another cypress knee. We push off and it hits another on the opposite side; the current moves us sideways against a tree buttress, and I briefly consider abandoning ship, lest we capsize in six inches of water. The paddle can be useful at both ends of the canoe, but if we both pull strongly on the same side at the same time, then …we’re with in with whatever fish are there. Sometimes we back up because the various openings are not wide enough or spaced apart enough to allow passage. We drag on the bottom. The canoe behind bumps into us. Then we turn in front of them to avoid a log. And so it goes for 10 minutes until we find a wider channel; and then it starts again.

            The water is high, or we’d be aground in a 10 mile wide swath of recovering swamp.  I say ‘recovering, because it was cut over, farmed, channelized and burnt many times over the last 200 years. Birds, snakes, bear, fish, raccoon, deer and the occasional bison and elk were hunted down as the European-based eastern seaboard culture moved west like termites chewing their way through wood, forming channels and burrows in the eatable valleys. These are mostly cypress, tupelo, and gum trees, but there are also splotches of marsh with bull tongue, waterlily, grasses, and reeds. Life will not be denied, in one form or another – it’s just that the place may silt in, foreign plants take over, birds disappear, and game be sparse. The largest cypress trees now reach up about 80 to 100 ft, but are only 4 to 5 ft wide. The record cypress in Mississippi is 15 ft. in diameter and the largest in the US is 17.5 feet in diameter. The biggest might have been 2000 years old. Gone now, for sure.

            Two of the 8 guides from the Wolf River Conservancy are behind mothering us along like a duet of parenting ducks teaching their newly hatched. One of them explored this section og the river  earlier this week to mark a new trail. Henry comes up from behind to joke that he has picked up the orange markers so that we can use them to mark the way forward, but wants to know “which way is forward?”. And it is not always clear where the trail is in either direction, either. Last year a helicopter picked up a pair of lost bayou paddlers. More people signed up for today’s trip, but the weather forecast discouraged them and they weren’t at the launch site when we left. But the temperature turned out to be agreeable and there is no rain. It’s cool enough to sweat, but warm enough to hold a paddle, and even to dry out if we tip over. The canoe needs only 2-3 inches of water and we are mostly in less than 1 ft of water. Some of the guides are in kayaks that are even closer to the water. Some of us are in wool (good if you fall in) and others in cotton (not so good). One has the ‘Full Monty’ – a neoprene diving suit from ankles to neck. The view from an airplane must be like a cluster of 11 dots moving across the green and brown, shivering, vibrating and mixing like water striders. If you haven’t seen them, water striders ‘walk’ on water supported by surface tension, with ripples emanating from each of its four legs. The water is muddy from eroded silts and clays. The paddle sometimes digs into sand, which would be bright white streaks when water is low and the surrounding land is restored.

            “We”, the tourists, includes the artist, Aviva Rahmani, and me, her team-member scientist who has signed up for what we call ‘art camp’. Aviva has the moxie to set this in motion and we try to help out. Another team member, Jim White, a paleo-ecologist from Boulder who is intimately involved in climate change programs is not here. The guides are from the thriving local canoeing club of the Wolf River Conservancy and are all a half-century old, or more. By virtue of their enthusiasm alone, they are helping reclaim, rehabilitate, re-discover, restore, and just enjoy what this place is and might become again. Mary is a computer-savy health specialist. The SoJourner brothers are former policeman and fireman. The names and specialists of the others are lost in a swirl of shadows and puddles, and I regret not writing them down, but we were in the midst of greenery, balancing, hunger, lightness, bugs and laughter. A camera does not work; cell phones are useless (thank goodness!), and the twists and turns around a thousand missed and a hundred un-missed obstacles kept us occupied.

            We stop at some high ground to chew and converse, point and laugh, and smile and inquire about each other. They are proud to be friends and find joy being on the water with a light touch. Some beaver mounds are discussed, the red-berried Ohio Buckeye pointed out, and… is it an eagle or an osprey nest over there?  Two of them?  And abandoned duck decoys – the flotsam and jetsam of modern life, like a plastic bottle, some loose twine, and plastic bag are picked up, but there is little of it. By the time we pull out to clean up and return home, we are tired, glad to survive and say quite honestly how much fun the work was, and that maybe we’d be a little sore tomorrow. Say, could you send some of those pictures? 

            Restoration in the broad sense of people, place and other, may be something like this canoe trip: Exploration, capsizes, led by both experience and chance, exchanging the lead to follow, tutoring and yelling, and with some companionship against the stream of dysfunctional pressure to subdue random acts of love, kindness, fun and exertion. The way back will be opaque in our collective memory for lack of examples, extinct species, and common goals. Moving forward with the current, we may get back with stiff muscles, but also with appreciations for how we need to just a little amount of gear to travel well, that the arch of similitude between our ancestral sensual lightness with the world and today can be couched simultaneously in awe and practicality.  But more on that later.

Fish Story Talk and Artmaking Workshop in Memphis, TN

Organizer - Aviva Rahmani, ecological artist, as a part of Memphis Social at Crosstown Arts

Address: 427 N Watkins St, Memphis, TN 38138

Phone:(901) 507-8030

Transit: Ncleveland@Autumn 

Monday, May 6, 6 - 7:30 pm  

Where do the lives of fish and people meet in Memphis? An evening of talk and artmaking will map the answers! Middle and high school students and community members welcome. The results will become part of a public exhibition at the Memphis College of Art. Please reserve your place. Refreshments will be served.

 Suggested donation to cover materials and refreshments: $30.

registration details- ghostnets@ghostnets.com

more info- www.ghostnets.com

Memphis Social calendar of events: 

Front side.http://memphissocialexhibition.wordpress.com/

Back side. http://memphissocialexhibition.wordpress.com/ 

Memphis has several special environmental and economic challenges. Some of Memphis' specialness is because of it's location along the Mississippi River, downstream of agriculture and upstream of the Gulf of Mexico. Could bringing together a small group of young people and adults, to share and map their experiences of the natural world, bring about some of the environmental changes Memphis might need?  

Some opportunities for change are in the health of local fish. Fish need clean, cool water. Healthy habitat for fish means a healthy environment for people. Together, we might find a way to make things better for fish, water and ourselves. The evening will include a brief talk, refreshments, The Anthropocene Game, a game to help us think differently about challenges for Memphis, making drawings about that need for change, a short period of meditation and music and a wrap up discussion. 

The result will be a map of our group insights, which will be shown publically at the Memphis College of Art, opening May 11, as part of Memphis Social. This may be the start of a longer project in 2014, which would include canoeing the Wolf River with a group of students.

Research for Fish Story

Detail of "River View #1," for Fish Story for Memphis Social, 13'x19" encaustic on paper

This is a detail of a series of google maps I've been working with to see how the water might behave along the backs of the Wolf River as it comes into the Mississippi, IF it were unimpeded by hardscaping and habitat fragmentation. Encaustic, a heated wax medium, behaves like water under the effect of the heat gun.

I used a combination of Phthalo blue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phthalocyanine_Blue_BNand metallic gold pigment to reflect how I think we have already chemically polluted our waters and what is driving that pollution, greed. In the upper left, where the Wolf should connect with the Mississippi, the effects blur, because the Army Corps of Engineer diverted the river to create a Peninsula http://tn-roots.com/tnshelby/history/mud_island.htm

The demographic infrastructures of Fish Story

This is what the mechanism of hope looks like to me. It is a diagram of how air is controlled in bel canto, the technique required for opera singing, by a combination of redundant anatomical engineering and the physics of sound waves.

Since I came back from Memphis about ten weeks ago, my attention has been on the finances and logistics of launching Fish Story. There is now a little less than ten weeks left before Fish Story will be completed, by which time I will have spent a year of my time conceptualizing and designing the work since Tom McGlynn first extended the invitation to me for Memphis Social. I've made progress with the help of my studio assistant, Daisy Morton. Along with Tom and Daisy, a number of wonderful folks in Memphis have guided my thinking, including Scott Banbury of the local Sierra Club, Matt Farr of Shelby Farms, Virginia McLean of Friends of Our Riverfront and Cathy Justis of the Wolf River Conservancy. They have each taught me an entire encyclopaedia about the political and biogeographic ecosystem they work in. This week, I had to accept that my goals for Memphis aren't going to be a trick I perform by May. May will have to be a salvo in a much longer process.

Memphis is not only the center of the world in a continental and paradigmatic sense, it is also the center of a world of complexity. Two elements seem at the heart of this complexity. One is the fish, whose life cycles reflect all the complexities I've been studying and considering this year about Memphis. The other element is "inner city youth," whom each of the people I've spoken to, whose mandate is the environment, have worked to engage with and bring into a relationship with the natural beauty of the region. Inner city youth are important because they represent a huge demographic of our collective future. Globally, they are now disenfranchised and vulnerable to manipulation. They are the raw material of unrest, gangs, terrorism, the target of fascistic enterprises and the fodder for dictatorships. They COULD be, the force that turns us all away from the disaster of the anthropocene. Right now, instead, funding for education, transportation, science research and other facilities that might bring them into a conversation with the rest of the world, are being cut even more than they already were. Memphis embodies the economic over-simplification the whole world is facing as the gap between rich and poor yawns ever wider, recapitulating the same gaps we see between humans as top predators and the other species we are predating.

It is not easy to engage impoverished young people and the percentage of them that my new friends have been able to reach, let alone their parents or grandparents is relatively small. The poor in Memphis, remain largely physically isolated from the more prosperous central city or the affluent suburbs of Germantown. The result is that a large sector of the population is not part of the solution to their own problems. That is the fascination of Memphis for me, how to draw all of "us" into a conversation about the anthropocene and empower everyone towards hope.

As I've worked on Fish Story, I've also been completing my dissertation, on Ghost Nets as a case study model for my theory of environmental restoration (trigger point theory). In the research for that writing, I've focused on studying issues in the littoral zone, the fragile area between marine life and land we call: "the beach." The littoral zone is important, not only for the life it supports, but because it is complex in the ways we need to make sense of for every other system on earth. Like Memphis, the very complexity of the challenge is the very paradigm we need to resolve for the survival of our species, along with every other species, as, fish.  In the littoral zone I've used fish as the fulcrum and harbinger of what that trigger point model needs to consider because they are among the most indicative taxa for ecosystem collapse. Since I began my PhD work in 2009, news of trophic cascades, species loss and other environmental disasters has only escalated. The challenge of finding solutions has proportionately dramatically increased, even as conservative forces have resisted necessary steps to alleviate problems and supported behavior that could only make things worse, as, fracking. This, in the face of calamities such as the BP spill and Sandy.

On Thursday, I spent the day traveling back and forth to Ramapo College, where I participated on a panel organized by Amy Lipton for the show she organized, "It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)." The exhibition includes my work, "Oil and Water." I commented in my opening remarks that any engineer can tell you a good system requires redundancies to be resilient to stress and that is what biodiversity permits in food webs. The danger of the anthropocene is that our predation and contamination of the environment has not only impacted but over-simplified every system on earth. The result is that we are eliminating those protective food web redundancies. In my writing and research trying to reconcile the problem of supporting resilient complexity in the face of the anthropocene, I have been inspired by two systemic models. One comes from the logistics of physics. The other is bel canto singing. Both are represented in my little diagram at the beginning of this post. I've studied bel canto since 1999, mostly with the coloratura Debra Vanderlinde, formerly with the New York City Opera.

What is relevant about bel canto, is how in the midst of the over-simplication of ecosystems we have precipitated, we contain a solution in our own bodies that conflates the complexity of physics and biological redundancy. The vocal system that produces music from the manipulation of air in a very small space in the human body: the space between the diaphragm and the mouth from which sound emerges, may be a viable model for future solutions to littoral zone problems, whether demographic or hydraulic. In effect, our body contains the very model for redundant complex engineering we need to study as a template for how a healthy infrastructure functions. The peripheral apparatus that produces an operatic aria is as complex as a healthy littoral zone that permits tidal flow for the health of water and biota (fish).

The trick I need to pull off, is to translate my diagram above into chipping away at solving the problems I see in Memphis, in a way that enhances the life of fish and by implication the lives of folks who eat them now. If I find a way to leverage those logistics, including a means to engage the many poor people to whom my diagram might seem irrelevant, the incrementally improved well-being of fish will be a measure of my success.

Fish Story launching on Rockethub

I have made the decision to set aside work on my dissertation so I can focus entirely on producing Fish Story for May. I'm diving in with both feet and beginning my launch with Rockethub to start raising some serious financial support. This is the project description that will go on line in 24 hours:

Fish Story is a May 2013 participatory public art project about water and habitat for Memphis, TN. 

  Fish Story is about how the lives of fish in the Mississippi River reflect global environmental challenges. It is planned by artist Aviva Rahmani for May 2013, Memphis, TN, as part of the city-wide Memphis Social, apexart franchise exhibition curated and organized by Beautiful Fields. Fish Story is based on four years of art/ science research with Gulf to Gulf, a series of webcasts about global warming. The project is designed as a model for artists, scientists, conservationists and activists to work together on ecosystem problems. Fish Story will unfold in 4 stages: 1. Traversing river tributaries, 2. Mapping knowledge at Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN., 3. Interpretive installation at Memphis College of Art, 4. Webcast public discussion about implications of what was learned and national options: May 11, 2011. 

First advance press for Fish Story

http://juicyheads.com/

I'm pleased to provide this link to the first media press for Fish Story. The visual is on the site of JUICYHEADS and in earlier posts here. The text is as follows:

Fish Story: Memphis is the center of the world. 

I'm interested in redefining public art as personal accountability to bioregions and environmental justice. That work includes creating strategies that catalyze overlapping constituencies to effect ecosystem resilience in the anthropocene.
Fish Story was created for Memphis Social, at the invitation of Tom McGlynn cofounder of "Beautiful Fields," (awarded the domestic 2013 franchise support grant from apexart). It is conceived as public art that straddles science, performance art and environmental restoration work to engage people in the conservation and restoration of waterways.
Memphis is the center of the world symbolically and continentally. It is significantly located along the Mississippi River, in the third largest watershed in the world, heavily polluted by factory farming upstream, which contributes to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico down stream. The city has been characterized as a racially divided, economically depressed community in which large numbers of young people have little access to opportunity or quality education. Memphis also has a rich history of activist volunteerism. These characteristics make it a good paradigm for the kinds of global circumstances and local engagement that determines water quality.

I am in Memphis to give fish a break

I AM IN MEMPHIS.

This is why:

“… global warming is likely to spur the disappearance of trout and salmon from as much as 18 to 38 percent of their current habitat by the year 2090. (and) …habitat loss for individual species could be as high as 17 percent by 2030, 34 percent by 2060 and 42 percent by 2090” http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/ntrout.asp

I'm staying at a quasi-commune church hostel community: PIlgrim House, where Flo, the young woman who greeted me, a student at Memphis College of Art, already knows all about Memphis Social for May, that I'm here for to start Fish Story and Crosstown Arts, where I'll present tomorrow evening. I asked Bradley, the young man who helped me get settled if people were concerned about climate change here. he said, "yes, quite." Good.

I have rehearsed my pitch: I am an ecological artist, part of a team with scientists to look at how communities can link up bioregional climate change issues, focusing on fish.

For Crosstown Arts, I assembled 20 slides for tomorrow night:

Using webcasts as leverage, workshops, GIS analysis and visuals, our goal is to help effect environmental  restoration. We believe Memphis is at the center of the world of climate change in North America, at a crossroads.

Fish Story update; one month after launch and more fish stories

Memphis airport website

After six months of planning, thinking and talking, it's exciting to announce that I have settled on a date to visit Memphis for the first time, to begin to move Fish Story forward. The dates have been pencilled in- December 12-14- and the first letters have been going out to specific people and institutions in the area. Susan Steinman and I talked earlier today to follow up some of our thinking. Gene Turner shared some ideas about engaging young people. I spoke at length with Tom McGlynn about what to schedule in that first window and with Eleanor Whitney, at NYFA about how to move forward with fund raising. Tom is writing the first letters of introduction for me to folks there. I'm beginning to break out a budget.

On my FB page, I wrote:

I have begun contacting people in Memphis for Fish Story. It feels big, scary, important & exciting. I got the intro down to an elevator pitch: "It is an ecological art project for Memphis Social, May 2013. Fish Story (see launch post on my

 blog @:http://pushingrocks.blogspot.com/2012/10/fish-story-launch-and-first-responders.html) is about how the impacts of climate change are reflected in the fate of fish in the Mississippi River."

And, I might add, how our attitudes about that reflect a lot more about our values and understanding. Now, going forward, I must state the caveat, that altho I feel anguish over animal suffering, in the interests of ruthless transparency, I do eat animals, including fish, so as long as that's true, I have no right to judge anyone else. I had salmon from Zabar's for lunch. That said, I would hope we consider fish seriously for two reasons.

1. Their fates reflect our careless disregard for the health of our own ecosystem- our home.
2.  They experience pain in death, as all animals we consume and out of respect for life, it seems to me we have an obligation to become mindful and responsible about those deaths.

Meanwhile, for a while, I wondered if anyone noticed the dead fish after Sandy.
There are dead carp in New Jersey now, fish that were washed into the wetlands with Sandy and when the waters receded, died. One biologist wasn't unhappy about that. He said they are invasive. But I can't help but think about evidence of sensitivity to pain and sentience in fish.
There are also dead fisheries: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/10/31/hurricanes_and_fisherydisasters/
But this isn't the first time.
In 2010, it happened in Cape May
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/08/hundreds_of_dead_fish_wash_ash.html.
and ominously, the seagulls wouldn't touch the dead Menhadin:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/12/jersey-shore-dead-fish-wa_n_680150.html
It also happened in 2007:
http://ind.gmnews.com/news/2007-09-19/front_page/001.html

The vegetarian aspect of our attitudes to animals as objects of consumption is horrifically engaged by Paul McCartney, sent by:

 Cristina Sedna Varuna, Seville, Spain

http://laverabestia.org/play.php?vid=1438

And more whimsically by Carissa Welton who wrote:

"I started swimming before I started walking. So it was only natural that I fantasized about being a mermaid as a child. I would always refuse to eat fish when it was served for dinner; I couldn't stomach eating my own kind."

In contrast, Susan Shulman http://www.susanshulman.com shared her artwork about fish, https://vimeo.com/45224958. In her statement, she writes, "My magic symbols of fish are a continuous theme running through my works, their scales have become my symbolic vocabulary, my musical notes, tones of fluid and soft movement, a visual syncopation between colour and imagery."

Fish tales, teams and dominance patterns

 

Fish in the Mississippi River are indicator species for the health of a far larger
biogepgraphic region that surrounds the river.

1: PM

In less than an hour, we will have a Gulf to Gulf webcast session for the team working on Fish Story.

That team for Fish Story, includes:

James Bradley, media provider, Executive Director at WebServes, New York, NY http://webserves.org/

Emily Caigan, Project manager for “Fish Story” West Hurley, NY

Daisy Morton, studio manager to Aviva Rahmani, Vinalhaven ME

Aviva Rahmani, ecological artist, University of Plymouth and INSTAAR affiliate Vinalhaven ME and New York, NY: ghostnets.com, avivarahmani.com

Susan Steinman, Director of WEAD, ecological artist, Berkeley, CA: http://www.steinmanstudio.com/

Eugene Turner, dead zone biologist, and Distinguished Research Master and Professor, Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA: http://www.oceanography.lsu.edu/turner.shtm

James White, paleoecologist, Professor of Geological Sciences, Fellow and Director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, CO: instaar.colorado.edu/index.html.

We will also be joined by Memphis Social curator Tom McGlynn who invited our participation.

There are going to be a number of important topics I hope we will address but I am still considering the lessons learned and considered about framing from last week's CT event. The two Sunday workshops that stuck in my mind, were the one on creating narratives in social practice, with Suzanne Lacy and Jodie Evans and the one Steve Lambert did about advertising and public art. The latter was intended to define points of entry with a community, how to listen and how to shape a work out of the input. It was mostly a discussion of how to listen, which I'm all for. The most important take away that I related to, was to look for the gap, the paradox, the intersection where values can be aligned. 

In working with scientists, finding that mystical point of entry is the most delicate and important part of my work and aligns with "trigger point theory," that small place I always look for, where hope can start to grow for environmental restoration. The trick in Fish Story will be to align that point of entry with the aspirations and concerns of people I may meet there.

Steve's workshop had us doing a deceptively simple exercize of making columns for old behavior (in this case, gutting the environment) and new behavior (finding ways to live resiliently with the rest of the natural world) and then breaking those two columns down in terms of the benefits and barriers each option convey. So, for example, an old behavior might be that it's easy to overfish and the ease is the benefit. The barrier to fully enjoying that old behavior to change is the fat that if we continue, there will be nothing left to exploit and deplete. The barrier to new behavior is just changing behavior and the difficulty of that change. People don't usually like something easy suddenly made more difficult. Steve reminded us that it's not just about the community we work with, it's also about not allowing ourselves to get burnt out.

In both workshops, the presumption was that an artist is invited in by a community to avoid the critique of "parachuting in" and then leaving. Suzanne and Jodi emphasized that building a good rapport for a project with integrity can take a year or more. But the third workshop workshop I participated in last Sunday, about the landslide caused by fracking in Taring Padi, assembled a memorializing action in one week, which has taken on a life of its own there. So these are 3 diff approaches to developing and sustaining social practice projects. What they all have in common is finding how & where to align an artists agenda with the community where the work will be presented. In the case of "Fish Story," it's not going to be just about those 2 agendas (art & the community), it's also about land management and what science can tell us about what is happening there. And then there's my agenda: to find a trigger point in environmental degradation to effect healing change ... without imposing myself  .... by finding ways to give voice to the voiceless on the ground. Not just fish. The people who want a world with fish.

So the critique of the first two social practice approaches above, is that they both, in effect, manipulate people to effect what a predetermined good may be but that "good" remains anthropocentric, human dominated. So how do I negotiate for the fish? How to I find the voices that speak for the fish among the people in Memphis? That search appears on the surface to argue for an inversion of familiar dominance patterns and by doing so, finding the path to speaking for the fish. It seems like a layered paradox to even consider that challenge. So that is the "little" gap/paradox I hope we will explore today.

4:PM

We had the meeting. I'm in absorption mode. The scientists are open and supportive. Gene showed us a picture of a 300 lb alligator gar which must have been 20' long, caught using a net & held up by a sports fisherman. 

Susan commented at the end of our meeting, "it's (Fish Story) so unlike you. It's so anthropocentric!!" I replied, "well, you can't do much restoration without a few people." I guess that's my paradoxical point of entry. Maybe the question now, is what behavioral change might make a difference, where in Memphis? Jim & Gene commented about how Memphis has seen itself as the center of the world because of it's historical position on the river. So what I might be looking for, is whom can tell me where might be the trigger in that center?

1910 Photo of 10' Alligator gar, author unknown

I was at the Met, with politics on my mind, to talk with Susan Leibovitz Steinman about "Fish Story" for the "Memphis Social" project May 2013. Walking to the stairs, I was greeted by the Acapela Blues singers playing, "Do you love me?"


I'm pulling together an amazing team of thinkers for "Fish Story," including the 2 scientists I've worked with the most since I began "Gulf to Gulf," in 2008: Gene Turner and Jim White. respectively a couple of the top people in the world working on dead zones in Gulf regions and global warming. The big deal now, is scheduling my first visit to Memphis, meeting folks there to hear their concerns and what they've already been working on. What I hope might come of that visit would be to begin to flesh out a picture of how Memphis is already functioning as a trigger point at a critical geographical nexus.

Memphis is between the Midwestern factory farms to the immediate North and melting Arctic to the far North, dead zones to the South in the Gulf of Mexico, at the base of the Mississippi, increasing drought and wild fires to the West, increasing floods and storms to the East and is on a river that reached historic flooding levels in 2011 and has recently had to be dredged when it fell too low for barge traffic in 2012.

The politics on my mind, are the surge of approval for Mitt Romney, which seems entirely based on whether Obama is a "strong leader," and whether he can deliver jobs, regardless of what those jobs are or the consequences, for example, extractive industries that destroy water and air, causing death and destruction, not just to wildlife but people.

Fish are an indicator species. I chose them as the focus for this project because they tell a story that's much more basic than all the political rhetoric in the world.