ABOUT Portable Memories in Rising Seas
Project Description
With interdisciplinary art methodologies, Fifty-Fifty is engaging communities to generate dialogue and to create an archive of reflections, providing an opportunity for the implications of climate change data to manifest on individual and collective levels. At public events, the community is invited to engage in film screenings, dialogue, and visual responses through mark-making on scratchboards. Discussions of proleptic mourning (anticipatory grief) and solastalgia (homesickness while one is still at home) give space for pause and open steps towards action. Following the public events, the participants’ drawings are interpreted into prints that become both archive and monument to local experience. Fifty-Fifty also shares participants’ stories underwater with nearby sea life in an attempt to keep memories local. The drawing, prints, and video ask – how do we grapple with the implications of climate change as they manifest on individual and collective levels in a place we are still actively creating?
Portable Memories in Rising Seas is a sequence of activities. As socially engaged art, each part of the process – film screenings, participatory drawing, interactive dialogue, underwater video, community exhibition, and publication – is valued as vital to the project’s success and impact.
Dialogue
Talking about change is part of the process of adapting. It also helps connect us so that we feel we are going through these changes together. Fifty-Fifty is committed to creating opportunities for discussion and sharing reflections about the changing landscape, stemming from our lived experiences and memories of the land, habitat, and local culture. This dialogue can link the sense of anticipated loss due to climate change to the stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – which ultimately have a transformative effect, allowing for positive action.
Films
Le Maison en Petits Cubes
12min | Animation | 2010. Director: Kunio Kato; Writers: Kunio Kato, Kenya Hirata; Music: Kenji Kondo; Produced by Robot Communications.
Thule Tuvalu
(26 min excerpt) 1h 36min | Documentary | 2015. Director and writer: Matthias von Gunten
These two films have been selected to elicit personal and geographical responses to issues of sea level rise. Le Maison en Petits Cubes is a short animated film about an older man who uses bricks to build his house higher and higher as it is threatened by rising waters, and then relives events from his past. Thule Tuvalu is a documentary that looks at the impact on two communities at opposite ends of the earth who face relocation and share a common destiny brought about by global warming.
Visual Responses
Participants are invited to record their responses to the films and dialogue on scratchboards distributed prior to the screenings. The scratchboards provide a receiving surface for people to doodle, draw, and make notes before, during, and after the films. Scratchboards are black clay- coated white paper; when one scratches the black surface away, the white paper underneath is revealed – an apt metaphor for scratching away the cultural surface to reveal submerged geographies and personal memories. At the end of the screening events, the marked scratchboards are collected and added to the ongoing archive of responses that Fifty-Fifty is generating.
Underwater Video
Participant scratchboards are scanned, copied, and laminated. These are taken underwater off the coast of south Florida where Fifty- Fifty films the sharing of the scratchboard drawings with fish and other sea creatures. The experiment of communicating across species and language is a poetic and absurdist gesture to keep memories local, to pass our stories to the eventual heirs of the place we now know of as South Florida.
Prints
Fifty-Fifty responds to the marks that participants have made on the scratchboards. After enhancing them with color, sometimes zooming into areas, selecting poignant bits of text and image, the scratchboard drawings are enlarged and inkjet printed. The anonymous marks retain their individuality while they are also exhibited as part of a large collective mural of 18” x 24” prints.
Archive Books
Scratchboards made by participants at community events are assembled into an archive book – a complete collection of the images produced at each location - that acts as a shared repository, a call to action, a space of reflection that works to mend the gap between experience of place and anticipatory loss.
Zines
A zine – a folded takeaway piece – is created for each location where Portable Memories in Rising Seas is presented. The zine contains some participant scratchboard images, writings on the subjects of climate change and memory.