coe007_fotofest-2016.mp3

Dominic Boyer: [00:00:26] Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast I am Dominic Boyer, and I'm joined by my co-host Cymene Howe.

Cymene Howe: [00:00:33] Welcome back, everybody.

Dominic Boyer: [00:00:34] And this week we have a very special guest in the studio with us today, Professor Joe Campana from Rice University's English department. By day, Joe is a mild mannered scholar of renaissance. By afternoon, he's a poet. By evening, he's a curator and art critic. He is truly a renaissance man and he is one of our most dearly devoted and beloved members of the Rice community and is the director of our arts and media cluster. So we're going to talk about today. This is a special sort of bonus double episode of the podcast. We're going to talk about Senses collaboration with Photo Fest 2016 and I to hand over to Cymene.

Cymene Howe: [00:01:14] Great. Well, thank you for coming out here. It's exciting because as you've been hearing on the weather forecasts, there is another storm coming and there's going to be rain and tornadoes and blustering wind. And so it seems like a very kind of darkly auspicious time to be having this collaborative show with sounds and photo fest. And I know that one segment of the show is actually called Another Storm is coming, and the other segment that we're sponsoring is called Dear Climate. So I wonder if you would. Dear Joe, tell us a little bit about the inspiration for this show and and the collaboration with Photo Fest and what we can expect and enjoy there.

Joe Campana: [00:01:54] Sure. You're absolutely right. It's an incredible it's incredible climate in weather timing for the show, great for the art, a little hard on the install, but I was there this morning. They're sort of managing all right. We got really interested in artists engaging, you know, as the Sense was forming and as the conversation about how humanist and social sciences scientists engage in questions about energy and the environmental humanities. I was already seeing so much art in the city, just even just here in Houston on that subject, and so it's been a really interesting part of of the activity, sort of in a surprising part of it. The great thing about this, this particular endeavor, is that we had already worked with Marine Reserve Corps was part of the collaborative group that put together Dear Climate. We'd already worked with her on a really fantastic meal called outside the work experience of geological time and petrochemicals and hydrocarbons through food. And so when we heard about her this this collaborative project, dear climate, it's really about addressing whether here we have it sort of bearing down on us right now. How do we talk to climate? How do we think about it differently? And so it's a fascinating mixture and you'll hear a little bit about it from Raina herself.

Joe Campana: [00:03:09] It's a fascinating question about what it means to address what it means to sort of think about think about climate in that sort of intimate way. Whereas the other part of the show, Judy Nettles, another storm is coming, came out of conversations with Judy, who had been here partly around Marina's dinner, but also for a number of the annual symposia. And she had started in New Orleans with this incredible piece of graffiti that just said another storm is coming right and it's all about it's about that sort of double sort of face of anticipation and a kind of and slightly about melancholia, right? Slightly about thinking about damage and ruin and slightly thinking about anticipation. What's coming? Is there a is there hope that's coming? Is there more terror coming? What exactly can we expect in a time of evermore arbitrary climate and whether her project is a mixture of video work? And, you know, it really extraordinary landscape and sort of portrait photography that really is sort of looks at the Gulf Coast between New Orleans and and Houston. She spent a lot of time in Port Arthur and Cameron Parish, Louisiana, and the work reflects that. Yeah. So as to interestingly sort of different approaches on this question of what we can expect.

Cymene Howe: [00:04:27] I mean, I think beyond the the art itself and the kind of poetics that are behind this collaboration and the coming together of these two shows is the setting in which the work is going to be displayed, right, the installation space itself. So could you tell us a little bit about that process and about the juice boxes

Dominic Boyer: [00:04:45] And also about why you know, necessity is the mother of invention? Yeah.

Joe Campana: [00:04:51] One of the most interestingly fortuitous things that happened. Of course, we had originally conceived of this as a gallery exhibition for the still soon to be coming to Moody Center for the Arts, which is literally going up right behind the site as sort of viewers will see, which is also created. This fantastic effect. It's so incredible to see these sort of steel girders behind the site. So we needed an alternative. Necessity is the mother of invention and happily through, especially through the School of Architecture's Rice Building workshop we sat down with. Andy Samuels and asked him to talk with us about some options, what's the sort of pop up space that we could use, which again is also really, really appropriate to both of these artists, though, of course we'd never planned that. So he put us in touch with Metal Lab with a company that works with translating storage containers into usable, flexible, solar powered space. And so it's incredibly happy result, which is that not only do we have these juice boxes, these sort of three units on campus, but they'll hopefully become a kind of long term part of the landscape at Rice University and be used in some hopefully interesting, different ways in the future.

Cymene Howe: [00:06:05] And they're repurposed containers and they're completely self-sufficient and they're finished inside.

Joe Campana: [00:06:11] Yes, yes, they're shipping containers. They are. They're sort of we're actually since we're actually finishing some of the electrical work is still being finished, but they're almost self-sustaining. Yeah, so they have solar, they run basic power AC even. And they were sort of what we have are their some of their original prototypes. And so they were outfitted. One of them is more of kind of more or less an office sort of fashion sort of. It's a little bit of fold out furniture, but they're incredibly flexible spaces. That's sort of great about them. They could be offices, they could be art installations. It could be all sorts of things.

Cymene Howe: [00:06:46] I kind of want one for my driveway.

Joe Campana: [00:06:48] We all do

Dominic Boyer: [00:06:49] So. So one thing I also just on the on the process of building, I think we should give a really special shout out to the Rice Building Workshop and Danny Samuels and Nona Grenadier and all the work they and the students have done. Do you want to say anything a bit about the collaborative process and what it was like working with the artists, as well as the students and the designers on this project? Yeah, one

Joe Campana: [00:07:08] Of the really again marvelous things that came out of the again initial sort of, I don't know sure if disappointments the right word, but shock of like, Oh wow, OK. So the space we were going to work in doesn't exist yet and won't exist in time. The nice thing about that is that so we had to sort of improvise and part of that became working with these sort of magnificent architecture students. They have been in contact with both artists regularly over the last month, starting in the sort of in August, really when classes started. The Race Building Workshop is has done quite a lot of interesting projects around the city. They've worked with Project Row Houses, they've done arts projects in Hermann Park. They're just incredible. And the great thing too, is that the students, I think, have a chance to, you know, they always have to work with various clients, but they get to work with artists, very particularly here to try to understand from the artist's point of view, what are the sort of important things which are the moments when they need to just really closely attend to what the artist wants, what are the moments when they're sort of improvising and actually kind of co-designing? It's been a really beautiful, fluid process, and partly because Danny and Noni are so fantastic and they've been running the workshop for so well for years, and we're just really, really lucky to get to work with them.

Cymene Howe: [00:08:19] This whole process has been a kind of element of climate change adaptation that no one could have guessed. Adaptation with the capital A..

Joe Campana: [00:08:28] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Cymene Howe: [00:08:30] And so this is also a project that's been done collaboratively to a degree with photo fest. Could you give us a quick summary of photo fest and their objectives or?

Joe Campana: [00:08:40] Yeah, especially for those listeners who aren't Houstonians, a lot of listeners. Photo Fest is a biennial. It's been going for some time now. It's been one of the highlights for me. I've lived in Houston about 10 years now. Each year is a different theme in this year's theme is particularly thinking about changing circumstances of climate. And so and in fact, it was sort of Dominic who met the organizers, the founders of Of Photo Fest, who got very excited about a collaboration with with Rice. So we are participating space. And the nice thing, too, is that we're not the only ones. The Glasscock School has a small exhibition that's opening up and also the Rices sort of visual and dramatic arts department. The Rice Media Center is hosting a photographer and a poet, Joshua Edwards. So we've had some nice collaborations, both with the umbrella organization Photo Fest, and they have their big opening here, this big opening Friday and also some nice collaborations on campus that we actually didn't didn't know about. So Saturday, when the exhibition opens, we'll have a sort of really fantastic event in collaboration with the Rice Media Center and with Photo Fest, who will be sending a bus of curators and other sort of folk in town to see all the magnificent photography in the city.

Dominic Boyer: [00:09:59] So since we're planning on broadcasting this episode on Friday, people who hear it, who are in the Houston area might be able to come to the opening. So do you want to give us a quick rundown on that?

Joe Campana: [00:10:08] I'd love to, and I hope they will. So we're we're planning the opening for roughly sort of six to nine. There'll be a number of events, partly on the our sort of jukebox site, which is a beautiful and now currently muddy little. Planned in front of the Moody Center, Moody Center for the Arts construction site and quite near the Tutor Field House, on site with the juice boxes and with Judy Natale's outdoor photography, we'll have a number of events to work out who works beautifully with food and thinking about how our sort of intimate everyday habits can help us think about big, big questions like climate change will be offering with the help of Houston's own really fantastic venue, Mongoose and Cobra, a climate change cocktail. So we'll we'll have a we'll have a sort of cocktail and toast that'll be followed by a number of songs by Port Arthur based and classically trained singer Richard Perkins, who you'll also be able to see on some of Judy's video work. He'll sing some songs of Storm and Hurricane in the coast, and then we'll eventually sort of wander our way inside to the Rice Media Center. Will there be a poetry reading of storm songs, hurricane prayers that Joshua Edwards are sort of poet photographer that Rice Media Center is sponsoring, and myself and a few others will take part in? And there'll be some hopefully Gulf Coast themed food there at the media center a little bit later. So, yeah, kind of a nice number of events between six and nine.

Dominic Boyer: [00:11:44] It sounds fabulous. And if you so if you can, if you can make it come out this Saturday, March 12th to the opening six to nine p.m.. If you can't, the show will be running through April 24th, so you've got about six weeks to come and see it, and it's going to be open Thursday and Friday, three to six p.m. Saturday, 10 to six, Sunday 12 to 5:00 and by appointment at Sense see NHS at Rice Ddu-Du. There's more details as to the site on the photo fest website, as well as at Cultures of Energy Porg, so I think that covers it. And now we're going to go a little bit more in depth with the artists themselves. Thank you so much, Joe, for joining us. Thank you for all your work on this project, for curating it for, for being the sort of leading energy behind the energy. And I think with that will sign off. No thank you, Joe. Thank you. We're live here with Marina Zarco and the Cultures of Energy podcast. Marina, welcome to Rice.

Speaker4: [00:12:59] Thanks so much. I'm so excited to be here.

Dominic Boyer: [00:13:01] We're just laughing and joking before we started recording about how many good ideas you have and how many amazing projects you've been involved with. We're so psyched to have you here with us in Houston and it rice for the next several weeks. So we've already had the intro. We've heard a little bit about the big picture of the sense photo fest thing that's going on. What we'd love to hear from you a bit about is dear climate. Where did it come from? What was the collaboration like, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker4: [00:13:25] So the project started, I guess I want to say three years ago with a conversation with Yuna Chaudhry, as it often does, where we're just riffing on what if we what are the problems with what can we do differently? And I had become there's some differences in the group, so I'll say it started with Yuna Chowdhury and myself, and then we invited two other people to join us. Fritz Ertl, who's a theatre director and sort of dramaturge teacher at NYU, at Tisch, and Oliver Hellhammer, who's a Canadian land artist and a writer and a dear friend of mine and a very interesting out of the box thinker loves weeds and really collages. And so the four of us ended up making this project. We started with a very tiny fund from the Visual Arts Initiative Award at Tisch. And from there, not that we've gotten any more funding, but we've had a lot of opportunities to expand the project. So the initial idea was to think about climate change from the point of view that we have an inner climate that we have to contend with and that there won't be any kind of real. There won't be any real. Paradigmatic changes, unless you really change the way that you perceive and interact with the world. Right. And my opening gambit was to think about this as an alternative to a survivalist guide which was quickly shot down by them or piss taking theater people who can't stand survivalists can't stand the idea of the sort of selfish me, myself and I need to just survive. So we had gone through. It was a long process of coming up with a name and figuring out really what the fulcrum of the project is. Even though we had already sort of manifest at the beginnings of the project and design and the posters and thinking about these podcasts.

Dominic Boyer: [00:15:15] The posters are incredible, by the way. They're beautiful, I think everyone and we're going to put some of them up on the site too. And you know, Tim, do you want to jump in on this or?

Cymene Howe: [00:15:25] Yeah, well, I was just I'm looking at some of these posters which are hilarious, some of them and brilliant and clever and punchy and provocative. And I think it's better to see them live. It's better to see the images with them. But even just the way that you've played with words is is fantastic, like empty nest question mark flock together. Don't fear the weather. Envy it. Let's see pants, water filter. What's the other one more in the flooded pines? Grieve the grid. The sky has fallen. Heed your greens. I mean, they're just, you know, really fantastic kind of plays with the with the ideas at work here. And so I hope that we can't put them up on the site so that people can actually see them if they're not able to see them here, live in Houston

Speaker4: [00:16:15] Or on the dear climate net website.

Cymene Howe: [00:16:18] Oh, good. Good point.

Speaker4: [00:16:19] So I should probably explain the overarching concept of the website. So the the center of this project exists on the web, and currently there are 68 posters and seven podcasts, and the posters are designed as a short experience agitprop gambit. You know, sort of a bid for a quick read and a kind of a jarring. I don't quite understand this. It has a kind of punk rock zen quality, but also a kind of higher design quality. They were designed to be printed out on with minimal ink on anybody's printer, and there are downloadable as PDFs, scalable PDFs, so anybody could download it. Print out eight and a half by 11 pictures. If that's what they had or they could print out huge posters, these things will scale. So those are the that's sort of the context for the posters. And then the podcasts are quite a different context. They are meditations. They begin with a meditation bell and they end with a meditation bell. And then they take you on some kind of a journey that's slightly disturbing and sort of upends your ideas about what meditation is and what it is to consider everything from all the names of the bodies of water to becoming friends with a weed or thinking about blessing everything on a flight from LaGuardia up into the sky.

Speaker4: [00:17:37] Hmm. So a lot of riffs on the idea of meta loving kindness, meditation, the idea of capacitive, compassionate meditation, thinking about loving everything, whether it's your friend or not, as a kind of a baseline of this project and that extends in the project, as Yuna puts it, the project kind of has three three phases to it that are not clarified in in the work itself, but were very much a sort of informed us structurally, which was. Let's see. Accepting the climate as a reality, grieve the grid flow with the floods, all this sort of posters befriending the climate, understanding that there are things that we, if we change our attitude, we can have a different relationship to when the third is becoming the climate. So the posters kind of get stranger and stranger, and so do the podcasts in relation to that structure. But the structure is quite latent, so you wouldn't necessarily see that in in the project.

Cymene Howe: [00:18:33] But that's neat because now we can look for that on the site and kind of take it deeper, right? Sort of drill down a little bit further and see that latency come up to you. Yeah, that's fantastic.

Dominic Boyer: [00:18:42] So is it is the project sort of finalized or is it iterative or you still like adding materials to this? Is it? Is it a kind of expansive archive that you can imagine? I don't know. That really doesn't have any closure to it because of course, you know, neither does the Anthropocene so far as we know, right?

Speaker4: [00:18:58] As far as we know, no. The project is iterative and we have plans for tons more posters, which I've actually been the one who's held off on making more because I feel like we've had such a lot to exploit already. But we have recorded four more podcasts, which I think take the tone of the project in really interesting ways, so we have to finish the sound design this summer.

Dominic Boyer: [00:19:22] Maybe this is a bit more of a meta question, but I was interested sort of, given that you've done a number of really interesting projects related to ecological themes, climate themes, Anthropocene themes over the past several years. I mean, is this particular project dear climate? Is this a sort of a watershed or a formative moment for you in terms of your work on those themes? Or, you know, some sort of a little insight into your process and sort of where how these projects evolve? And I mean, I think a lot of them are collaborative, right? So I know that's really important to you. Maybe you could say a bit more about that.

Speaker4: [00:19:57] Well, every collaboration is going to have a different flavour, and it's been wonderful working with theatre people. They're very irreverent. They're very word based. They're Yuna and Fritz and Oliver. He's not a theater person, but he's equally out of his mind as the rest of us and has a very different perspective. We all have a lot of difference. We've had a lot of arguments about this project, and I wouldn't say it's a watershed moment, but it it it was a relief. In many ways. It's it was not. I don't want to say it wasn't production intensive, but it's very different from a lot of the software based work that I do or these dinners, these very complicated sort of pre-production spaces. And it was wonderful to me to figure out how to create some tools that were going to be accessible by all sorts of people and to welcome people to participate in different ways. I mean, we had one artist in Ireland who used the posters in her own exhibition and designed a couple of her own posters as well, which was perfectly fine to a certain extent. I'm going to say that I've given up all of my control in terms of being a designer, but it was it was pretty exciting. We've had a few people do that. We've had a lot of people download them and paste them up on campuses, and I've been trying to encourage people to print them out and put them inside the Walgreens coupon folders. It's great, and I haven't I don't know if that's really happened yet, but that's sort of my dream is that these things become these sort of stealthy coupons.

Cymene Howe: [00:21:22] Well, it will now.

Speaker4: [00:21:24] Well, that's part of why

Cymene Howe: [00:21:25] I'm saying once we cast it out there

Speaker4: [00:21:27] And there's one other component to the project that you have to dig a little bit on the website for, which is the letters. So dear climate literally isn't just our dear precious climate, but also dear climate comma, right? And Yuna has spearheaded doing a lot of these letter writing workshops with people where we've asked people to write letters to the climate. In fact, there is an invitation on the website to do so, and we would love people to submit them. We're really interested, not just in. I'm so sorry, we screwed everything up. Please forgive us. But more. What would a tree say? What would a plum tree say specifically? What would a mouse say?

Speaker5: [00:22:01] What would a particle of?

Speaker4: [00:22:06] Air pollution say so really trying to sort of open up what it means to have an authorial voice and to interact with this thing that's usually perceived as such an abstraction. How do you objectify it and actually talk to it?

Cymene Howe: [00:22:17] Mm hmm. I mean, one of the things that comes to mind too, and the way that these pieces can be reproduced and printed out and made into posters or postcards, or even T-shirts or stickers or anything that you would want to use as a medium in order to convey, the message is that we're at a kind of moment. I mean, obviously, it's a technological moment, but it had me starting to think about Walter Benjamin's famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and it seems that you've really taken advantage of this, except that it's more like the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, and it allows it to be disseminated and to move into different ways to go to an artist in Ireland and, you know, have her craft her own version of it. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about that, the medium of the digital of the internet, of sort of being able to cast these these visions in in wider forms than you might in just a gallery space or at a dinner or or another kind of enclosed

Speaker4: [00:23:20] Art art medium, right? A medium with a velvet rope around it. Right. This is much more difficult to disseminate. Frankly, I love the opportunities in this kind of nebulous space that the internet offers and the the freeness free posters of what we've offered people. But what I've learned in doing a whole bunch of participatory projects since 2001 is that these projects work best when there are some face to face workshop like guidance to encourage people to do things, especially because these are not DIY invitations. These are authored pieces that were asking people to to kind of partake in, which is in a way complicated because it's neither here nor there. I'm not really giving you authorship, I'm giving you distribution permission. Mm hmm. So that assumes that you want to distribute my things or our things. In this case, it's a little funny for me. It's a it's an ironic contrast to the work that I show in galleries where there's an artificial limitation on the additions. You know, I sell software based animation and galleries there. Auditioned. They run out. That's the end of it. They get more expensive. I mean, it's it's great because it supports my collaborative, collective studio practices. But it's absurd because there's no reason why that stuff can't be infinitely reproduced. So it's a kind of a leftover from the print language. You know, we're going to we're going to make 10 prints and then we're going to have one artist proof and then want to throw away the plate. It doesn't exist anymore. So this project does give us this opportunity to say do what you want. It's under a Creative Commons license. I can't remember which one we did, and I don't think it was the full the full butchering of do whatever you want with our stuff, but it was close to that. Mm hmm.

Cymene Howe: [00:25:10] Mm hmm. So it's really open and a lot of ways, but not infinitely

Speaker4: [00:25:13] Not infinitely know. It's limited by this trying to negotiate between authorship and distribution and creative. I guess I would call it creative distribution. How do you create space for people to participate in, engender conversation for them using these posters and the podcast as prompts?

Cymene Howe: [00:25:29] I know we were talking earlier about another project, a different project, and you were reflecting on art as a kind of conceptual space or the term of art and saying that you don't want to sort of devolve art to simply a platitude of changing minds. And I think that is a kind of a truism or a homily or a platitude that we hear a lot, you know, art changes minds. And I like the way you put it because you said, actually, art is more like material encounters or short circuiting of expectations or upending conventions. And I think those are really rich ways of thinking about art as a practice and as a process. So I wonder if you could speak to a little bit about the kind of the spaces in which pedagogy or a message or teaching or, you know, sharing of ideas or reflections becomes entangled with art itself? Is there a kind of space where that gets limbed together or are these sort of separate projects? Do you see the do you see a pedagogical element in your in your art practice or or not? If you could just

Speaker4: [00:26:33] Think about defined pedagogy as you see it,

Cymene Howe: [00:26:36] Well, a kind of a teaching, right, that there's a true message that that you're trying to convey to a viewer or a user that that we could locate and that I could come to you and ask you, you know, what does this quote unquote mean? And you would have a message there that that you're trying to to share with the world.

Speaker4: [00:26:57] I've thought a lot about this for so many reasons. If you came to me and said, what does this mean, I would try to ask you some questions. Mm hmm. As opposed to tell you what it meant and I've been very committed to creating spaces in the work that I make that. Upend your expectations, as you quoted. And create a kind of a space of productive confusion. Mm hmm. But that suggest other ways forward than the way that you might necessarily interact with a plastic cup or interact with a bug or interact with a bird or the sounds of traffic or your thermostat. Not because you should. Not because it's the right thing to do, but because of trying to. Produce a space in which curiosity and the imagination are at work. And I think that's really the thing that art does very well when it does it well, is it hybridizing? It doesn't. Propagandize, so I'm not proselytizing whatsoever, in fact, I've every time I've come near that, I've sort of tried to beeline away from those spaces of singular messages, or you should do this, and I'm much more interested in doing the work that art does through. In many cases, material encounters. I'm touching my fingers because I'm thinking about how much the research and explorations that I've done have changed me and have changed the way that I touch things in the way that I consider the materials that we consume live with, ignore in really different ways. And so I've tried not in all of my work. I wouldn't say the animations do this, and I wouldn't say that the posters themselves are material encounters, but hopefully because they're kind of commanding, but they're not commanding you. You should do something and they don't produce any guilt and they don't tell you how to be. They simply suggest ways in which you can have material encounters. I think my hope is that those little shocks would for a moment get you to think differently.

Cymene Howe: [00:29:07] I mean, I know that after experiencing some of your work on plastics, I never see Tyvek in the same way that I did before.

Speaker4: [00:29:15] I'm fine.

Cymene Howe: [00:29:16] It's just everywhere. Cruise around Houston and you will see much Tyvek and it is definitely colored.

Dominic Boyer: [00:29:24] Yeah, I wanted to. I really think that I think, you know, in my non-expert artistic judgment, I really think their climate works in that way. I think it is it it is effective, it affects you, but it doesn't sort of message you in a in a sort of cloying way, which I think is often the worry, you know, or the accusation that art or sort of critically minded people are saying, you know, they're they're playing on guilt, they're doing sort of, you know, dirty tricks with our spirit to sort of get us to feel bad about ourselves. But rather, I mean, and so I think it's a really effective. In fact, I think all of all of your work walks that fine line really well in terms of creating effects that are unsettling, but without without the usual times of you should feel bad that you consume this and that much plastic. So I was thinking of that other project that you did. The name of which escapes me at the moment, but where you were sort of handing out people were coming in with the plastic that was on their person and you were handing them little plastic balls. I don't know if you would want to share a bit about that, but I thought that was a great project for again, sort of confronting people with something about their relationship to their lived environment. That sort of prompted reflection, maybe, or conversation, but with an outcome that was uncertain.

Speaker4: [00:30:37] Are you talking about the landfill club?

Dominic Boyer: [00:30:39] I felt like you set up. You set up a couple of little booths.

Speaker4: [00:30:43] Immortal, immortal. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, I did with Sarah Rothberg.

Dominic Boyer: [00:30:47] Ok, let's hear about that one.

Speaker4: [00:30:49] We set up a booth and we looked semi-official and it was at a ferret that the New Museum hosted, which was an eco sustainability art fair, but more around urban planning and architecture. And we offer people the opportunity to have everything in their bags and on their bodies weighed and measured for the plastics content. And then we kind of typed up a receipt for them and then we figured out what the gram total was for the amount of plastic they had, and they basically had to dump everything out into onto a scale one of those balancing scales. And we would then balance what they had put in the scale with nurdles and we grind, which is plastic that's been melted down, reclaimed and melted down and turned back into pellets. So we had tons of this. We grind that I had gotten from the very shady and strange world of plastics trading. Commodities used plastics commodities, which has done in a lot of really weird little back room garages. And I had these people accumulate tons of samples that are sent to them, and I had gone gotten hundreds of pounds of different kinds of re grind. It's very, very beautiful. And then we would offer people that they could have all their things back. Plus they could have jars with the weight of plastic they had on their bodies, which nobody wanted. But we have these wonderful photographs of of the red bin with all of their belongings, and we had average people. We wanted everyone to get naked in a changing booth and we'd weigh their bras and we weigh everything. But we couldn't do that because we're out in the street. So we had averaged what bras were, you know, worth in terms of weight of nylon or their sneakers and so on. And we ended up having this wonderful time because we were touching their clothing and we were really interacting with them. And then we have these great photos. They're on my website, on Walmart.com, of their bean with all of their possessions. And then there have been with just filled with nurdles. So it was a nice visualization.

Dominic Boyer: [00:32:47] So you've you've already you've already exhibited your climate at least once, right? Several times, several times already. So what what is the response you're getting? I mean, have you? I mean, both in terms of the response to installations and also the response to kind of the online presence. Has anything surprised you there or sort of confirmed your hopes?

Speaker4: [00:33:06] Well, it's hilarious. We installed last week at the New York Public Library. They have these tiny vitrine windows on the sides of the Mid Manhattan Library, so there's two big revolving doors and those small Victorian windows, and the installation couldn't be more different than what we're doing here at Rice. We did one window that simply is plaster punk rock style, with grand opening, really cheap grand opening Xerox's and in the middle of it as one of the posters, the poster of it says Travel mentally and then the the window on the right. So it's sort of time based you have. If you look at from the street on the left, you have grand opening and on the right you have everything must go in red sort of frantic letters. So the language of sales is on Fifth Avenue and and there's a tiny iPad showing the posters as a slideshow stuck in the middle of the everything must go pictures. And when we were installing Oliver and I installed the windows, people were in a panic because they thought the library was going out of business. So can I. That was a surprise, but I'm not going to say that it was an informing surprise for me. It was more wow, that was very literal, so to speak.

Speaker4: [00:34:22] And we also showed dear climate in two trailers in and Hoven at the Mu Museum. And one of the trailers was just the posters, floors, walls, ceilings and a little desk you could write a letter at. And the other trailer was pitch dark and had dirt on the floor, and you just sat in there and listen to the podcasts. And that was very, I think, a very nice installation. We got some positive feedback, but the most interesting incarnation of this was just a lecture, lecture presentations that we've done at some conferences where we've planted people in the audience to read these letters to sort of pop up and appear as these different kind of person, everything from God to a disappointed author to a tree. And so that was sort of wonderfully performative and and really productive. And the other wonderful discovery is people at conferences really like to be told to uncross their legs, close their eyes and just listen to something. It was very wonderful to lead these meditations in groups, so we would I would instruct everybody to relax, take a few deep breaths and then I play one of the podcasts and people were just so happy to have an unsettling moment with other people with themselves.

Dominic Boyer: [00:35:43] It's very beautiful. Yeah, we did something like that at the anthropology meetings last year. We did a pop up panel and the Anthropocene two and turn the lights down did short papers, you know, gave people a chance to come up. But they were so unused to the idea of actually getting to interact with somebody and an academic conference. They sort of were stunned a little bit and they weren't sure what to do. And then somebody came up and did a terrific presentation.

Cymene Howe: [00:36:08] I was going to ask a question about how you came up with all of the the language for the posters, like how you how you came up with the ideas and the wording and the images and or is that is that secret? Is that secret information?

Speaker4: [00:36:23] No. But, you know, sometimes it's very hard to track back. I want to say that Euna and Fritz wrote most of those in strange secret brainstorming sessions over bottles of wine, but it was a lot more organic than that, and you can see some legacies. The more prescriptive posters from the earlier survivalist modality like pants, leg, you know, water filter pants, leg shelter, bamboo. Those were more prescriptive and those are very much sort of were where we started. And then they just got sort of stranger and stranger. And I like to attribute that to Fritz and and Euna. They're really good wordsmiths and they have a blast together coming up with all this insanity. So it was a pleasure to work with those texts as a as a visual person and to find the right kind of punk rock images that would offset those texts in ways that expanded their meaning. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I want to circle back just to say one thing about you asked earlier, Was this a watershed project for me? Yeah. And I want to say that one of the things that I've appreciated about this group so much is their refusal to participate in the Anthropocene and Time's narrative, OK? And that, for me, was a bit of a watershed and to to stop sort of stop. It's cheap. And it's not to say that any of us think we're going to be around any longer because of this, but more a sense of what can we do in this moment? What can we do even right here in this conversation that we're having that feels connecting and imaginative?

Dominic Boyer: [00:38:03] Well, that's great. And maybe apropos of that, a good a good thing to sort of close out on is talking a little bit, giving us maybe a little a little glimpse of some of the things you're working on now and what you're going to be doing while you're in Houston. Because the show is going up this, it's opening on Saturday, but you're going to be here several weeks yet. And well, again, not to put words in your mouth, but I understand there are jellyfish involved.

Speaker4: [00:38:28] Yes. My long standing interest in signal species to eat so that you can have interesting, intimate conversations about climate change through the foods that you eat. So I'm partly here working with two chefs, Ryan Parra and Justin Yu from Ox Heart and Revival Market.

Dominic Boyer: [00:38:50] Oh yeah. It's a big one here in town.

Speaker4: [00:38:53] Yeah. Well, and actually, Ryan from Revival and two other restaurants that he runs is sort of my main, my main man on this project. I'm really excited about this exploration we're going to do, and we're really doing R&D on figuring out what kind of shelf stable foods you can make from jellyfish things like candies or jerky or bubble tea. It's it's a it's an interesting food stuff because it's quite tasteless. It's abundance. It's very, very good for you. It's a lot of proteins, some interesting proteins. There's some research. It's inconclusive, but there's research being done around Alzheimer's and rheumatoid arthritis. It's filled with collagen, so it's really interesting. I like to think of it, and I know I'm being hyperbolic. I've been corrected recently by Julie Buchwald, who's writing a book on Jellyfish that it's the perfect American diet food for people who want to live forever and be skinny. Wow. And have really good skin and have great skin.

Dominic Boyer: [00:39:59] Yeah, but it kind of reminds me, you know, I don't know if this is part of the same thought process, but in in the artist meal that you did hear a couple of years back, there was one of the great sort of moments and that was the rise of slime, right? So in part, is it the case that one of the reasons why you're interested in jellyfish is sort of the role they sort of occupy in an increasingly stressed ocean ecosystem where the the species that we usually eat are sort of or overfishing them? And yet then you also have things like ocean acidification, which are affecting other species. And that I remember again, if I'm if I'm remembering it right that that part of what you were talking about was that we had all of these ancient species like algae and jellyfish were coming back again, right? And that they were sort of the future of the ocean and a lot of ways. And so, you know, it behooves us to sort of understand like that future and to find a way to engage it.

Speaker4: [00:40:56] Yeah. So the the umbrella of this part of my ocean, my giant oceanic project that's going to take the next 10 or 20 years to do that. I've started and I've opened too many doors, but one of them is this is this product line that the jellyfish is one example of called making the best of it. And I'm really interested in that title for obvious reasons. I do want the food to be fantastic, but I also want to talk about making the best of what we've done and to be really fully frontal about not in a punishing bit way, but to understand the systems relationships between these animals and plants and what produces the environmental contexts for their thriving. So I'm also I'm working on dandelions in Minnesota right now has another example of this with a collective of collaboration between a four or five people up there.

Cymene Howe: [00:41:52] What is the story with dandelions?

Speaker4: [00:41:55] Oh, goodness.

Cymene Howe: [00:41:56] Well, women are hardy for sure, and they pop up in the most random of places.

Speaker4: [00:42:02] But yeah, and people despise them, but they're quite benign. People also love them, right? You can make wishes with them. You can make wishes with them. Children love them. I think they're anatomically really interesting. We had to pick in a species to do this project. It was an NEA funded project that'll be at Northern Spark, which is an all night festival that 2016 Northern Spark 2017 Northern Spark devoted to climate change. And we got this funding to do two iterations of a project around a signal species sort of making the best of it. Sort of. How do you become more nimble? How do you think about the food system differently? How do we stop these large agricultural dependencies in which they're very object oriented dependencies and when you have trouble with, you know, a mono crop? How do you cultivate some nimbleness in in in the face of that? So that was in a way, the beginning motivation. And there are a lot of vilified invasive species, and it's really fun to hate them and I. Finding that argument really tired, so we pick the dandelion, we wanted to do a vegetable, not an animal, but we picked it because it is it is very complex.

Speaker4: [00:43:13] It has a complex sort of semiotic to it. Everything from if you have a lawn, you despise it, but you still might go to Whole Foods and buy some dandelion greens. The reason you would buy some dandelion greens is because dandelion are fantastic, nutritious and really good prebiotic food. They're filled with inulin and things that encourage your upper gut biota to flourish. And the reason why they're everywhere is because people brought them for their medicine gardens. So they've been a friend of humans for a really long time, and I find that really interesting, as opposed to something like Japanese knotweed, which was not a friend of many humans. It was a more medicinal plant in mostly China, and it's a very powerful plant. But that plan is she is a monster. So we sort of stayed away from the hate rhetoric and tried to find something that had a little more friendliness to it, which is an experiment for me. I tend more towards the darkness, so I'm interested in how this is going to go.

Dominic Boyer: [00:44:14] All right. Well, Marina, when we when we put a pin in it there because we want to hear more about your experiences in Houston down the road and how these projects develop, we are so looking forward to working with you on them to supporting you as you do them. So grateful for how you've inspired us to think and feel differently about the Anthropocene. Just thank you so much for coming and sharing your work.

Speaker4: [00:44:36] Thank you, guys. You guys are wonderful discussants.

Dominic Boyer: [00:44:39] Thank you. It's very kind.

Cymene Howe: [00:44:47] Well, I just wanted to extend a super, super warm welcome on this very humid day to Judy Natale, and we're so happy to have you here. Welcome to Houston and welcome to the storm and welcome to Rice. We're really thrilled to have you here. We wanted to talk today a bit about the show and the work that you've been doing over the last several months. And here, a little bit more about your inspiration and your motivation for doing the work that you've been doing as an artist and where you've traveled to. What kinds of encounters you've had through the through the medium of your art and through the medium of engaging with people. So tell us about the other storm that's coming.

Speaker5: [00:45:33] Well, thank you, Dominic. Thank you, Simone. Another storm is coming. Actually, the project actually started over two years ago in New Orleans. I had an opportunity to exhibit an earlier project called Future Perfect, where I'm trying to imagine what the landscapes of the future might look like in hopes of illuminating the present and the choices that we're making environmentally. While I was in New Orleans, I, you know, I sort of extended my stay and scouted around. Now this is eight years post-Katrina and I have to. And I had been hearing reports that New Orleans was totally recovered, that it was back to normal, back to business, and that's what I expected to find. What I found instead was a lot of trauma that was still very visceral and visible, both in the landscape and in in just talking to people and and people's lives. And I was profoundly affected by that, and I started kind of doing what I call scouting. So just looking around, looking at the landscape, asking a lot of questions. So I'm always looking for a landscape that can sustain of visible dialogue of of a complexity of human nature. And I certainly found it in and around New Orleans. And one afternoon, I tiptoed into the back end of the abandoned Six Flags that was inundated by Katrina and now is in a battle between the city of New Orleans and Six Flags in terms of whether to demolish it, whether to reconstruct it, either of which would cost a lot of money. And there I found a piece of graffiti on a door like a chartreuse door in a room that was turquoise walls, mud and mold and debris everywhere.

Speaker5: [00:47:50] And on the door was a graffiti that said Yelp. And then at the very bottom of the door was a very small drawing of a storm cloud and a lightning bolt. And it and then a text that said another storm is coming. And I just stopped in my tracks. I went, Wow, you know, that pretty much sums it up. It's definitely tells a story of the future, perhaps a darker vision of the future than I really care to think about or make art about. But that's where the title came from. That was the inception of the project. And then. That was then I had an opportunity to present at Cultures of Energy Symposium, which I was so thrilled to have the invitation and to meet you all and and I'm just wowed by what you're doing. And. You know, I should say just to back up a minute. At the same time that I was in New Orleans, I was asked to to present a lecture, which I decided to turn into a conversation about social engagement, issues of social engagement and photography. And if there's any place to talk about social engagement, it's New Orleans. It's a very community based grassroots type of city. And I, when I was approached about this, I said I wouldn't. Presume to come in and lecture New Orleans folks on social engagement because they live it and breathe it and do it every day. I was just starting to think about it as I researched over a year of a keynote presentation I was giving at a national conference called Society for Photographic Education.

Speaker5: [00:49:50] So I was fairly new to this. But having recognized that, I needed to move my art more towards social practice and away from the sort of fine art orientation that I had been doing for many years. So these two events collided this encountering and and sort of embracing ideas of social engagement and activism, which are different and, you know, experiencing New Orleans and the trauma of Katrina. And at that point, well, actually earlier I've had committed my work toward this idea of of using it as a point of dialogue to talk about environmental issues. So that gives you a little background at the cultures of energy. When I met you and Dominique, I had, we talked about the possibility of creating a body of work for exhibition that would debut at the new Moody Center for the Arts. And what I proposed then was that I continue. Another storm is coming. But I think about it more broadly between Houston, the Astrodome and New Orleans. The Superdome, which I think of as parentheses around another storm is coming because so much has taken place between these two sites in these two cities. And then the project would move along the Gulf Coast between these two cities. So I've spent the last two years scouting the Gulf Coast, meeting people, studying the environmental impact, studying the ecosystems. I'm a city girl, so I was really new to the idea of swamp and bayou and marsh and the Gulf. And so it's been an extraordinary two years of learning and and. And meeting people and exploring.

Cymene Howe: [00:52:18] I mean, it sounds like a lot of what you've been doing is very ethnographic, you know, kind of an an anthropological way, talking to people, studying the environment and the context and everything that you're trying that you're representing through your artwork. I know that one of the things you've said is that that this work really provides another opportunity for you to explore the role of artists as activists. And I think that that's a very important point. But I wanted to come back to another point that you made earlier and that is exploring and seeking out landscapes. And so you said that you're a city girl and and I think it's interesting to think about the landscape as the sort of point of reference. You know, we think about making art out of certain objects or trying to objectify a certain set of processes. What is it about landscape as a kind of as a rubric that that draws you? And I suppose that landscape it, it doesn't necessarily mean pastoral, you know, horizons of mountain crests and birds flying off into the wild blue yonder. It's it can be any kinds of really transformed, very urban landscapes. But I just wanted to take a second to reflect on on why landscape, why that why that draws you as a category?

Speaker5: [00:53:33] Well, for me, my work is really situated. Where there are dualities, I see myself as sort of sitting on a fence. And there are always these opposing forces kind of raging. And so in the landscape, it's the built environment and then these romantic notions of a pristine nature that we seem to still be carrying around. And and I have to say, I think there are pockets of them, as long as you don't think about air and water, soil and things that you can't see. And so for me, this idea of the landscape sustaining a visual dialogue, it's it's sort of this idea of these dualities of wonderment and horror and sort of attraction and repulsion and awe and transcendence of nature kind of opposed by the forces of destruction that humans seem to want to enact onto the land. And so this is, I have to say, the landscape also is. That my interaction with the landscape can be the least exploitative. I'm very, very, very sensitive about photographing people's homes and what I call devastation porn. And so when I go out into the landscape, I have this freedom to kind of explore these opposing forces that I'm seeing and feeling and researching without saying to people, You know, why is this happening? You're the cause of it.

Speaker5: [00:55:32] I really felt that strongly in New Orleans that there I really did not want to photograph people's homes or even in neighborhoods. Even though I walked through neighborhoods, I talked to people. I I'm not a documentary photographer, I'm an artist who who creates acts of interpretation to and the landscape is a perfect canvas to construct these conversations. People are, though I'm really interested in hearing their stories, and my work has moved more towards surprisingly more toward narrative, which years ago, if somebody would have told me that I'm going to be telling stories with my work, I would have said, You're crazy. You know that a photograph should just embody a singular thought. And years later, I finding myself really compelled to tell stories of, you know, imagination, curiosity, people, how people's lives are affected by issues of climate change and environmental destruction. And and then the opposite of that, the idea of resurrection and resilience and recovery, both of the of nature and of people. And so again, those opposing forces have become very evident and they're they're very evident in this work. Another storm is coming.

Dominic Boyer: [00:57:06] Judy, I wanted to to follow up on this theme of trauma and resilience a little bit. And just parenthetically, I'll say that, you know, for the benefit of listeners who may not be aware of just how vulnerable this zone is between the Superdome and the Astrodome that you're talking about. I had a chance to look at the sort of NASA sort of sea level rise maps and even in the sort of scenarios in which you had the sort of least amount of sea level rise. Most of this area is underwater. I mean, halfway between Houston and the Gulf Coast is underwater. Port Arthur is underwater. Areas south and west of New Orleans are underwater. Many of the places where you did research have, in some ways, this very bleak future in this if if the sort of processes of climate change are allowed to unfold in the way they did. So it's both, you know, another storm is coming, certainly. But at the same time, the floods are coming and everything else, it's very biblical. And I was just curious what some of the strategies you found that people had for coming to terms with this. How did they stay resilient in in the sort of face of this, this future?

Speaker5: [00:58:12] Well, it's a great question, and you certainly did your research. I looked at those same maps as I was researching and in fact debated whether to put them into the library, which is one of the parts of this multi-part project. It's kind of shocking to really realize how squishy that landscape is, and all you have to do is walk on it to realize that and that cultures have created ways of happily living in this very wet, squishy environment. The loss of the wetlands and the loss of the coastline, our questions and how people are coming to terms with that is something that I directly asked them. So for this project, I created two videos. One is called Breathed on the Waters, which is an an examination and a questioning of the profound symbols of faith that I found everywhere in the landscape. And in talking with people, the importance of faith in terms of dealing with the questions that you're asking about, how can they continue to live in this environment and return and return and return after storm after storm after storm has come and wipe them out? And the second video especially addresses this, which is called Storm Redux and this these. Our oral history so, so many to your very keen observation of it being ethnographic.

Speaker5: [01:00:00] I really wanted people. I wanted to record people's stories in their own words. These are beautiful people that I met who are smart and engaged and sort of challenge our very stereotypical ideas of people who live on the Gulf Coast. So individuals like Philip Scooter Trust Clear, who is the director of the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, I interviewed him and I asked. I interviewed a retired game warden. I interviewed a cattle rancher, so people who were living on the land were. I asked the same questions, What happened? Tell me your story. What has happened to your family? How do you feel about climate change? Why do you return? Because I just can't wrap my head around it, and the two videos are very directly questions that I'm asking out loud. I've said this before, but my mother said I came out of her womb asking questions, and I'm very, very good at asking questions. And someone recently asked me in a panel discussion what I thought the answer was, and I said, You know, I don't take that as my mission to know, but that when humans create collectives and they the brainpower gets combined, I really believe that we can work toward successful solutions of these enormous, overwhelming problems.

Speaker5: [01:01:39] And I think the Center for Energy and Environmental Research and the Human Sciences, that's a collective that are coming together and talking about these issues, publishing around these issues. So the stories and the. People and the loss of the wetlands, I mean, it's it's such a complicated area. And that's what I had to learn that I knew it was complicated, but I'm an outsider coming in and I asked people to help me unpack these layers of questions. So it's oil culture, it's loss of the wetlands, it's loss of the coast. It's, you know, the sustainability of hunting and fishing and. Of all kinds of alligators. Duck, just all kinds of critters that that, you know, make me kind of go you. But. It's a beautiful area, and the. And they're there, people like the director of the wildlife refuge, they're trying so hard to come up with viable answers to maintain the coastline. And all I can say is I want to invite people to come see the videos because these individuals speak far more eloquently than I could about what they're doing to try to remedy some of these situations.

Dominic Boyer: [01:03:20] If I can follow up. Thanks, Judy. You know, some of the most I think haunting images in in another storm is coming, at least to me, were the sort of juxtapositions of oil infrastructure you just talked about sort of oil culture, oil infrastructure and then nature right side by side. And they both look a little beleaguered often, but which I think, you know, I don't know if that's intentional or just the way it is, but often with the storm cloud in the background. And I was curious about sort of because oil is so important a part of the economy of this area to write that. And historically, for four decades, generations have grown up in oil culture. Did you find that people were wrestling with that? Were they sort of wrestling with that paradox of, on the one hand, our economy, our livelihood is tied up with exactly the same thing that is helping to drive the rising floodwaters.

Speaker5: [01:04:16] Well, it is a very complicated issue, and there I found absolutely no easy answers. I asked people about it. They made assumptions about me that I as one one. Craig Guillory, the game warden, called me because I figured you were a tree hugger. And I said, Well, you got it right. So everybody, you know, I'm from Chicago, so that's Obama country. And you know, Obama's not particularly loved in in this part of the world, and although I love him dearly. And so the the the oil is so visible in the landscape, the infrastructure. I spent a day on a shrimp fishing boat or shrimp or shrimping boat to float in Galveston Bay, photographing the abandoned oil sites. It's a graveyard. It is literally a graveyard, it costs too much money to remove all this rusted infrastructure. And they say, Oh, well, you know, ecosystems are reclaiming it. Yes, that is true, but it's also inviting invasive species that normally wouldn't be hanging out there because there wouldn't be a place for them to thrive. And, you know, I think it's it sounds kind of silly, but when I spoke with Craig Guillory, the game warden, he reminds me that again, this is where the power of the story comes in. He continued to remind me that if there isn't fresh water and there isn't food, the species won't be there. They won't survive. And so the and oil is increasing in that part of the world.

Speaker5: [01:06:16] So after scouting the entire Gulf Coast between Houston and New Orleans, I picked two sites Port Arthur, Texas, the largest oil port in the country, and I picked Cameron Parish, which has been just devastated repeatedly by storms and hurricanes and rebuilt that at one time it was a town of 3000. It's now a town of 100 to 200. If you don't count the oil workers and they're putting in a liquid gas peninsula there now. And that is going to turn this town of Cameron into a man camp, much like we saw with fracking and what happened to those communities. And there's one of the last things I heard before I left Cameron on this last trip in December for a month, in December. In January, was that the there there? The Liquid Gas Corporation is claiming the peninsula where there was a public, a beautiful public kind of recreational center, picnic area boat launch. It was really lovely right on the coast and and I was told that they will. The town will no longer have it and it's not exactly like there are a lot of these places there. It was one and the town no longer will have it, but they also desperately need the resources, the schools. Build it, rebuilding the coast, sustaining their culture, and there is a profound culture and multiple cultures along the Gulf Coast, you can't kind of wrap it up into one kind of culture.

Dominic Boyer: [01:08:23] I wanted to ask you about that because this is just one of the things. Another really striking part of the show are the the hurricane prayers and the songs that sort of commemorate the Hurricanes. And that really does give you insight into how how much these storms are part of the fabric of the local culture in this region, right? And so I was wondering if to go back to the sort of the beautiful people who live there, whether they're moments in which you were just, you know, amazed, stunned, surprised by the cultural complexity of how people engaged these storms?

Speaker5: [01:08:58] Well, the people I met were, you know, just so surprising. A retired opera singer and we actually met in the parking lot of the Museum of the Gulf Coast. That was the one place I knew where the museum was. I had been speaking with the curator. And so she put me in touch with Richard Perkins, the retired opera singer who's traveled all over the world performing. And he so I played him some music, and I said that I showed him the kinds of songs I was looking for him to perform for. Of this video, I breathed on the waters. And he said, Well, here's what I'm prepared to sing. And it was so picture it a parking lot, a car totally empty on Sunday morning. And he opens his mouth and this gospel. I've been in the storm so long comes out and his he's a bass and his voice is so powerful that it kind of knocks you in your chest. And I burst into tears. I just couldn't believe this voice and. This worldliness came out of this person, and he was so incredibly generous to perform, I interviewed him and and this was repeated over and over, so I met. Linda Picchu is her nickname darlin and a manual, a manual as a musician. And he and writes songs he's played with Conway Twitty.

Speaker5: [01:10:42] I think his daughters married to Conway Twitty son, and they performed on an on a song that he wrote called Hurricane Women. So it's the hurricane women refers to Audrey, Rita, Katrina. Those are the hurricane women. The, you know, the idea that a Buddhist monk would allow me to transport him to a site of what I call air stairs. So these are stairs that are we've seen a million of them there, stairs that are still standing after the home has or building has been destroyed. And part of this project was to kind of allow us to reclaim these sites as transcendent spaces that people these were people's homes. This is where people lived. They're not just architectural remnants or debris, nameless, thoughtless debris that they were entry ways into people's lives. And so the air stairs all over the Cameron and Port Arthur became sites for these performances of a Buddhist monk chanting prayers a a Catholic priest reciting a hurricane prayer last March. This incredible woman, Claire Haber Marceau, took me to a religious monument in in Cameron. And while she was showing this to me, she said, Oh yeah, we recite a hurricane prayer, you know, every week during the hurricane season. And I was like, You what? And she stood there and recited it for me.

Speaker5: [01:12:51] And again, this instant, it instantly taps into this emotional response of kind of wonder and horror of, for me that that kind of wonder that faith could be so strong and horror because I have such a hard time believing that. And so during the course of this past month, December, January, I attended more religious services than I've of all kinds of denominations the Gospel Church in Port Arthur and Galveston, actually a Spanish prayer mass in Port Arthur. You know, just a Vietnamese prayer, mass Catholic prayer mass in Port Arthur, and just a variety of of services to kind of think about these intersections of of faith and and different expressions so that a Cajun singing a song that he wrote about Hurricane Women is equal to and honoring kind of the the hurricane and the experience. And also it also mentions faith and belief in in God. And so I think these various ways of expressing their love of home, their love of culture, and that it's these traditions that keep them rooted to the land, even though, as you've said, the land is kind of moving under their feet. But I think I've sort of wandered from oil culture to faith. That's an interesting intersection.

Cymene Howe: [01:14:47] Well, it happened organically, so there must be something there. And one of the things that you've been really interested in capturing not only in this body of work, but in your in your future perfect work and others is the space between land and water. And one of the reasons you've been interested in that particular space is because of its lack of hierarchies, which I think is a really profound statement. And. I know that during this project, you've been spending a lot of time, like you've been saying, adventuring around through swamps and bayous and branches of rivers and all kinds of ambiguous sort of wetland spaces. I was having a conversation the other day with a colleague who's an anthropologist, and we were talking about coastlines and kind of being on the beach and talking about that very liminal space, because when you're when you're on the dry sand, you feel very much as though you're on the land and then you start to ebb as it were toward the water and the sand gets harder and maybe gets softer first, then it gets harder and then it gets soft again as you get into the into the ocean, right into the sea, into the bay. And so we were talking about how really how ambiguous that space is, right? Because you don't quite know exactly where the beach ends and where the ocean, the bay, the sea begins as you're walking through it as it wind, you know, the water comes up to your knee.

Cymene Howe: [01:16:13] Are you in the ocean then or are you still on the beach because you can still feel sand underneath your feet? And so all of that kind of ambiguity. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about those what what the attraction is of those liminal spaces, because it seems to me to that part of what you're capturing here in looking at the transformation of coasts is also an ideal metaphor in some ways for climate change, because in some sense, these coasts that you've been visiting have been lost and then regained. And you know, if we follow the NASA predictions, they'll quote unquote be lost forever. But then a new coast will begin or a new edge between between the land and the water. And so I don't know if there's something kind of a grander kind of meta message that you're seeking out here when you look at these, these betwixt and between spaces, between land and water, because it seems to me that is the kind of ideal metaphor for climate change as we're thinking about sea level rise and these storms coming to occupy land in ways that they haven't before.

Speaker5: [01:17:23] Well, again, very astute because one of the titles I was considering for this project was liminal zones because I think by nature, I'm kind of a subversive. So I quietly, I like to think so. I like these areas that are gray. I don't like black and I don't like white. I like the gray where you can kind of maneuver a more freely. And so I'm attracted to those spaces, physical spaces in the world that allow me to artistically explore, investigate, ask those myriad questions. And also, we're the answers aren't so cut and dry. And that's where creating these acts of interpretation come in. So you're absolutely right. I'm looking for opportunity of metaphor of all kinds. The title Another Storm Is Coming isn't simply referring to literally the storm. It could be. Another storm is coming religiously. Another storm is coming naturally. Another storm is coming. Emotionally, there's these layers of meaning. And as I was photographing and videotaping and just wandering, I kept realizing how many layers that phrase has. So the. And when I told individuals that who I when I met them, what the title of my work was and I said, I'm working on a project called Another Storm is coming. People who have been who have lived in this landscape went, Oh, there was a real dread in the impact of the title where someone like me living in Chicago. You know, I think I think, Oh, well, there are all these layers, but for someone living in Cameron, there's one meaning to that. Another storm is coming could also be economically oil wise.

Speaker5: [01:19:39] What when people said, Well, we're really tied to the land? You know, oil has been in our family. It sustained our family and I'm like, It's time to innovate. It's time to become an entrepreneur. It's time to think imaginatively about how we can begin to make a shift from oil culture to other culture, whether it be wind, solar or other things that we have yet to even discover. So the liminal zones or this idea of mentality? Sahib, something that I find really, really interesting. The metaphors, I mean, are so obvious, you know, Dominick, you mentioned the floods and a project that I worked on two summers ago is actually called the floating world, where I put farm workers at Shelburne Farms into Lake Champlain with the animals that they worked with. So like a cow and a lamb and strings of vegetables or whatever. And I'm really thinking about these forecasts of the apocalypse, and I'm really thinking about dystopias and all of the residences of science fiction that are kind of. Of scarily coming to pass, I'm aware of these things and and I'm definitely thinking about them, but I I feel that. All those things that are frightening and terrifying, and we can now imagine them actually happening. The cog in that wheel is human nature and our ability to be resilient, our ability to do surprising things and to just surprise ourselves. And I have to say that when I the position that I take is I am one of the people that I see in the world.

Speaker5: [01:21:49] I don't take myself out of that. I. You know, I presume that the people I'm talking to know a lot more than I do about the various subjects, and I'm just asking the dumbest questions, and people have been very kind and patient with me. So metaphor is the key. As a longtime photo educator, I'm constantly talking to my students about the power of metaphor and meaning how you construct meaning, and I'm trying very hard to do that to one. Just one last point in terms of this juxtaposition of nature and oil, where it looked like neither one were fairing very well. You're absolutely right. One of the surprising things that I discovered was when there seemed to be a very large oil port or an oil refinery. There surprisingly are not so surprisingly seem to be a wildlife refuge or a nature preserve. And I started seeing this repeatedly. So oil nature preserve oil nature, and I'm like, Well, are they? Are they actually very consciously putting nature in the way to as a buffer zone that will be devastated by because by a BP oil spill? You know, and we we know the consequences of that. What happened to the ecosystems and immediately what happened to the animals and the wildlife that you know what happened at BP? So those things are very, very possible. And I'm expecting an oil spill to happen again. And so another storm is coming is also another oil spill is going to happen. And you don't need a crystal ball to see that.

Cymene Howe: [01:23:55] I have a kind of outlandish question if you'll tolerate it, and it's it's it kind of moving the our gaze upward from the space of of water and land and landscapes and skyward. And I know from speaking to enough people who use photographs as their art medium that one of the most important things as you're taking photographs is the light and the light conditions of a place. And illumination is incredibly impactful. In a way, it transforms the space in what it allows you to do as you're as you're making the photographs. And I also know that you've done quite a bit of work in Iceland, which has, by all accounts, even from an amateurs point of view, this really spectacular, beautiful crystalline light. And there are certain places in the world that have that. And I'm not a climate scientist and I'm not a meteorologist, and I know that you're not either. But I started speculating about how the light will change in the future. That is the natural light of any one place. As storms become more recurrent, maybe a thousand years from now, as light gets refracted differently off of droplets of water that are in the sky or in clouds as land forms are less covered in ice and more covered in topsoil or in volcanic rock. If we could think about how the kind of photographer that you know, the photo art maker of the future might encounter light. And again, I know it's a very outlandish question, but I don't know. It started to get me thinking about what what will what will the light be like for for photographs if we're even still doing those, if we're even still around in those days? But what would it be like?

Speaker5: [01:25:48] Well, you the example you gave was Iceland and Iceland has an incredible erosion problem. They're losing what little topsoil they have at an incredible rate. And one of the photographs I made was this very beautiful, pale blue landscape netting, holding up a gigantic side of a mountain because they're just, you know, with the wind and natural forces, but also overgrazing of the sheep. And there's a lot of reasons for it which I won't go into. But. And so that dust is is in the air, even though the the lava and the volcanic rock and the glaciers, what's left of them are filtering the air. So when you step off the plane, you feel like you're breathing the most beautiful air in the world and it's really spectacular. But over the course of the five to seven years that I've been working in Iceland, one of the primary glaciers, oh, I don't even want to attempt the name at taffeta yet.

Dominic Boyer: [01:27:04] That's pretty good. That's pretty

Speaker5: [01:27:05] Good. If you get the yokel, this is the one that created the air traffic jam. So I spent a lot of time on that glacier filming and creating some videos called the custodian about an Icelandic woman who was tending the earth, sweeping the glacier, scrubbing the rocks, caretaking the Earth. Sweeping tire tracks on where they don't, you know, off away from where they don't belong, things like that. And so the light is not, you know, the light is beautiful. But it's also not as pristine as we may think it is, and you know, that imperfection is actually the thing that creates such beauty right sunsets, we know we had spectacular sunsets from that eruption. And so another storm is coming. I wish I had a dollar every time I said to someone, Well, I can't film you today because it's too sunny. Can we come back tomorrow? Or I look at my phone, the weather and it tells me in three days, so I schedule. I said, Let's come back in three days, it's going to be raining. Yes, it's going to be overcast, actually clear. The woman I mentioned earlier, she goes, Oh, she said, Wednesday is going to be doom and gloom light that should be good for you, you know? So I kind of really liked what she called it doom and gloom light and and.

Speaker5: [01:28:48] I think that so this this whole project is filled with that kind of light is recorded with this heaviness, this overcast ness, this foreboding and. When Hurricane, when Katrina hit, you know, tragedy, right, and everybody collectively knew it. And then. Unbeknownst to us, Rita also hit three weeks later in Cameron Parish, but they closed the town to reporters, so no one really knew about Hurricane Rita, but it wiped out Holly Beach. The The Cajun Riviera, as it was known, wiped it out, flattened it. Nothing. Cameron Parish was devastated. And so where was I going with that? So the the idea of the light, you know, being doom and gloom. All I can say is, I guess I I would put it in the form of a question, is that the kind of light we want to live with in the future because we have a choice is is the air. One of the most dystopian science fiction novels I ever read was called The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. And people are walking around in gas masks. Is that the kind of light and air we want our children to be breathing and to be photographing in? There's an artist named Penelope Amreeka, and she's actually her work, all is based on internet Instagram photos, and she did a piece of sunsets.

Speaker5: [01:30:37] That's just a huge wall of a grid of sunsets that she downloaded from Instagram, and people started photographing themselves. Viewers audience started photographing themselves in front of it as if it were a sunset, you know, and it was a beautiful installation. I love her work, but it's not the real thing. And this. Raises all kinds of other questions about authenticity and technology and our ability to experience viscerally the thing itself. I'm old fashioned, I like experiencing the thing itself. Um, I like I love doom and gloom light, but I don't want to live with it all the time, it's it's. It's. Like today, it's a very overcast, but the the point I actually was going to make about the doom and gloom is, you know, all the science fiction stories have us living underground. Do we want to do that? We the idea of this project, the idea of my work, is asking those questions and finding finding our way and living into the answer that doesn't have us living underground.

Dominic Boyer: [01:32:04] Well, I think that seems like a great place to pause. And of course, we're hoping we'll can have you back at some point in the future to talk more about your next projects. But asking us about the kind of light we want to live in, I think is a great as a great way to sort of extend an invitation to everyone who's listening, who can make it to Houston in the next six weeks to come and see this marvelous show. Another storm is coming. And thank you so much for being with us answering our questions for painting these marvelous landscapes with words. It's been really inspiring to work with you on this project, Judy. So thank you so much.

Speaker5: [01:32:38] Thank you both. Thank you so much.

Cymene Howe: [01:32:41] Thank you. We'll talk more.