Fish Story Launch and first responders

These are the first stories in response to today's launch of Fish Story:

From Mo Dawley:

On Oct 24, 2012, at 2:32 PM, Mo Dawley wrote:

I was resting by a small pond one day at Beechwood  Farms Nature Reserve near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when I happened to notice two fish swimming together near the water's edge. One of the fish was having a hard time staying afloat without beginning to lean sideways as if on its way to turning belly-up. Each time the fish began to lean, every few seconds the other fish gently guided its companion upright with the side of its body or with a gentle nudge with its nose. It was the first time I had ever seen a fish practice loving kindness.

Mo Dawley
Pittsburgh PA

from Susan Knight: 

      When our families got together at a cottage on Spring Lake in Michigan    

      my friend Jack and I fished off the dock and from an aluminum rowboat with   

      a nine horsepower motor.  On simple bamboo poles we pulled up bluegill, bass, perch and turtles.               

      We noted their size and color and most of the time threw them back. When a hideous looking fish took our bate we excitedly brought it up to show our parents.  It was a bullhead.  Perhaps it was the fish’s menacing face and whiskers; perhaps it was its sinister color and scaleless body that determined its fate.  We bludgeoned it with shovels.

      Susan Knight

This was the launch:
Ghost of bluegill past Aviva Rahmani, 2012

Tell me a fish story

    Artist Aviva Rahmani, guest artist Susan Leibovitz Steinman, the Gulf to Gulf team and friends invite you to add your fish story to the Fish Story project, part of Memphis Social, May 2013 in Memphis, TN, a citywide exhibition and presentation of art and cultural events at the intersection of art and social issues. We are beginning a new fundraising campaign to launch this fresh phase of Gulf to Gulf. We invite you to consider donating your financial support to the launch of Fish Story. Your tax deductible donation will go to planning and implementing an ambitious community project. Please circulate this invitation to colleagues to help us expand our support base. Detailed information on how to submit your story and contribute financially is at the end of this letter.  

    Right now, we are collecting fish stories, images and experiences for web publication.Your story may open a point of entry for our new friends in Memphis. Depending on your support, our wish list includes: a series of visits to the Memphis community; several webcasts for public discourse, including one on-site in May; a dedicated collection website; local workshops and gatherings to analyze and assess our experiences; a "fish-in" on the banks of the river; an installation and evening events with a nationally streamed webcast and breaking ground on an agreed upon local "trigger point" site of restoration, to affect the future of fish and people!

Here is Aviva's fish story:

I remember the only time my Father invited me go fishing with him. It was a sunny, warm day. I was four. In our rowboat out on the water, he had a can of worms, from which he pulled a fat candidate with one hand, while lifting a hook with the other. Suddenly, I realized he meant to thread the sharp, steel point through that small, soft, helpless creature's body and I began shrieking, sobbing uncontrollably and inconsolably, as, shocked and confused, he stared into my face. That was how I first learned where dinner came from. - Aviva Rahmani, October 2012

    Our November goal is to send Aviva to Memphis, to meet people, deepening our research phase, connecting land and water, people and fish. She will document her observations with photography, drawings, maps and text and post them on line. Please visit her new blog for progress reports: http://pushingrocks.blogspot.com/.

 Do you have a fish story to share?

    Please send your fish stories and related material to Aviva @ ghostnets@ghostnets.com, with the subject line: fish story and indicate whether you give permission for publication. Fish Story is being created for Memphis Social at the invitation of curator Tom McGlynn of Beautiful Fields. Memphis Social is sponsored by apexart. Fish Story is part of Gulf to Gulf, a fiscally sponsored project of Artspire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Art (NYFA). NYFA is a 501©3, tax exempt organization. Contributions to Gulf to Gulf for Fish Story are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law. To donate please visit our page here:http://artspire.org/DirectoryDetail/tabid/95/id/143/Default.aspx 

Thank you for your participation and support!

Sincerely,

Aviva and the Gulf to Gulf team

                                                                                                                

The Gulf to Gulf team includes:

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

Emily Caigan, Director, Legacy Arts Management, www.legacyartsmgt.com 

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/ 

R. Eugene Turner, 'dead zone' and wetland ecologist, 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 would like to thank Louisiana State University and University of Colorado at Boulder for their ongoing support of the Gulf to Gulf project.

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