Full Transcript

INTRO 

This is The Climate Story Project— where we share real stories about how climate change is shaping our lives. Stories that connect us. Stories that move us to act. This is a project of the New York Climate Exchange, a non-profit organization that’s accelerating climate solutions through a unique partnership model and climate campus on Governors Island. In each episode, you’ll hear voices from different places and walks of life in our growing archive of personal climate stories, so that we can remember, reflect, and respond together.

The story you’re about to hear is from Carlos Rigau. Carlos is an Artist-In-Residence from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a partner of the New York Climate Exchange. 

CARLOS

It's very important for us to be on this planet, and live in it, and do what's best to live in it, which probably means taking care of it as much as we can. I'm an artist, I'm concerned about these kind of things. I've done different projects around ecology, which in its basic term means the relationship between people and the environment.

I did an artist residency in the Everglades, in a place called Airy. I’m from Miami Florida, but we never went to the Everglades as a kid because they had built all these canals bisecting the state of Florida. So it cut off the water egress from Lago Okeechobee, so you didn't have that natural run, which is what the Everglades is. It's a slow moving river. So everything was just dying and brown and shitty and… So you wouldn't go there.

Bill Clinton's last act as he's leaving as the president was the National Everglades Restoration Act. Making these canals basically get dredged over, making the water come back. So now when you go to the Everglades, it looks far different than it did when I was a kid. But it's still not what it was, but it's better than what it was. There's far more alligators and now invasive species like pythons, which is probably okay. Whatever, they can live there.

That Everglades project in particular was fastened around the fact that we're gonna get used to move into the Everglades and say it's great to be there, very sustainable. And so the whole project was kind of around like a pseudo company that's making WeWork spaces in the middle of the Everglades in an abandoned rocket ship factory. And there's a real rocket ship factory that was abandoned.

Through that work, I met a native who's a Miccosukee, whose name is Otter Cypress, Reverend Otto Cypress. And so I built a relationship with him. He taught me different stuff about the world out there. And he's like a poet and an activist and the Everglades.

And since then, I've also done residencies in New Mexico in like the middle of like the desert, and like, close to Los Almos. Los Almos was where invented the nuke and tested it close by. In the area that I was in, I was in a residency in Carrizozo, and I was really interested in this area that has this like 78 mile lava run. There is no actual volcano. There's no peak. The earth splits and lava comes out. And on the other side of that rift is the Trinity site where the first atomic bomb was tested. So I was interested in this sort of like gravitas of that area and making work there. 

Through that, I met people that are called Downwinders, which are generational people that were affected by the testing of the first atomic bomb. They were meeting at an ice cream shop, not in Carrizozo, but in a town right outside of it called Tularosa. And there was a sign that said “Downwinders meeting” and it was happening like 10 minutes later. I was like, you know, I'm just going to chill out here and have ice cream and wait to see who these people show up. And they showed up.

None of the people who experienced the actual detonation of the bomb were alive or lived there anymore. We're talking about next generation that still lived there that were related to these people that lived there. And they were kind of discussing their experiences and medical conditions and things like that and relaying it to each other.

When I meet these people, I kind of build narratives through these interactions. I work with drones, but I work with drones as characters. And so then the drones behavior in those environments acts a little different. 'cause now they've influenced my information on it. From Otto Cypress that I met in the Everglades, this person that I met out in New Mexico, just like, they inform these works differently.

So what does it look like? It looks a little bit like theater, a little bit like sculpture, and a little bit like windows. Like a window. There'll be three screens. There'll be vertical. There'll be some sort of region where there's volcanic run. There's an abandoned rocket ship factory. There's a train town. In these three screens, there's a drone in each one of them, the drone’s connected to all of them, these disparate landscapes, and there's action within these landscapes. But you're disconnected 'cause one you can clearly see is an abandoned factory in the Everglades, another's like in the desert, in a lava run. But the drone's connecting them. But then eventually the drone just turns around and looks at the viewer. So eventually all three screens drop, the drones are looking at you, and then you kinda look around and see what it's looking at. I'm interested in that. 

The role of the artist is to engage someone in these disparate landscapes and kind of bring them together. And this is in the kind of, again, ecological way of speaking. Bring these landscapes together. These places, time, space are in fact connected. Not to get too Disney and Pocahontas about it, but we are all connected to each other. And so by using a kind of a visual device such as just like the top of a building may touch the bottom of a train track or something and then kind of connect this way, 'cause people are limited, right? We have our brain systems, we're limited. If you put a line like this, put another line like that, we're gonna follow it. Just, that's how we are. So you use that as a strategy to connect it and then you use the drone as a strategy to connect time and space. Now it's different, you’re not just connecting landscape. It’s time. 

It’s important to investigate the past, and once you do that, you fairly quickly land on the natural environment. Doesn't take much to do that. It just, that's how it is. We don't exist outside of the natural environment. This is something I discuss amongst peers, artists, peers, quite a bit. It's like, what's the point of doing this? Like who am I gonna affect? Like what am I doing this for? And it's not so much that the work you're making changes or the art you're making, whatever that means, changes an outcome somewhere else, but it changes you a little bit. It changes the way you view the world, 'cause now you're participating in the world in this engaged way. So that probably then changes people in relation to you just a little bit, Just enough.

I meet Reverend Otto Cyprus. I'm at a bar with an ecologist in New Mexico, next to a Downwinder from, you know, this is important. This is the way it works to me. Ecology and the concerns around it have kind of veered me this way.

OUTRO 

This story is part of The Climate Story Project. To find more stories and learn more about The New York Climate Exchange, visit nyclimateexchange.org and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. This episode was produced by Kylie Miller. Thanks for listening.