Rising Tide
Rising Tides is a multi-media installation that interrogates the ramifications and fluidity of climate change as it relates to identity. The project addresses (primarily) cultural and ecological concerns in coastal environments through storytelling [and speculation]. Based in Miami, this project focuses awareness on the urgency of climate change and rising sea levels, not just as a futuristic metaphor, but as a driver for urban Climate Gentrification.
The coast acts as a liminal space between the built and natural environments. Rising Tides explores themes of climate change, identity, justice, movement, technology and [littoral] urbanism through various digital and analogue processes as a means of revealing and reconstructing the feedback loop of an oral history between place and the suppressed narratives of vulnerable peoples.
We are interested in interrogating and speculating the future of Miami (and its residents) as it negotiates with the issue of climate change. Understanding that residents of lower-income communities may not have the resources to relocate, how might they adapt to rising sea levels? How do they engage in/with their now altered built environment? How do they engage in acts of joy/liberation?
Elements of the project include: a compilation of maps grounding the project and providing context; an oral history loop of stories and voices of residents and activists that have to contend with this reality; a vessel that might allow these residents to move through and occupy these spaces in the future.
The vessel is derived from the form of the porch, acting as a public commons to be inhabited by the residents of the neighborhood and facilitating various programs while responding to fluctuating water levels. The piece is in conversation with the water, the greater Miami community and with climate change, to start the conversation we ask:
Who has a
Right to the city
Right to the water
Right to space
A seat at the table
Right to the city
Right to the water
Right to space
A seat at the table
A Potential Way to Survive
The Voyage
The Last Dinner
People’s Lounge
Cinema Paradiso
Steps to survive from Rising Tide
The Call
Gather here, gather now!
If this was your last supper
surviving climate change,
what would you bring to the table?
If this was your last supper
surviving climate change,
what would you bring to the table?
Calling
community members,
planners,
policy makers
and artist
to take a seat at the table
planners,
policy makers
and artist
to take a seat at the table
Assembly Framwork
Let it flow
The vessel is designed in reaction to the current context of the built environment along vulnerable coasts. It appropriates the materials of scaffolding, lumber and textiles used in development and construction processes displacing communities in order to produce profit. The vessel enables these displaced communities as informal designers to construct modular structures that react to the fluctuating sea level rises utilizing the waste generated in construction.
An assembly booklet is deployed to communities as a guide for constructing the vessel with an array of variations in materials and uses to combat Miami’s Rising Tides. The materiality of the vessel is made economically accessible and democratizes the repurposing of construction waste as an interrogation of the current realities of climate based gentrification and a speculative future of survivalism.
Historic Hampton House Forum
Center for Sub Tropical Affairs Diner
^in collaboration with Romy Saint Hiliare and Gabriel Soomar