Just before dawn, from a high-rise on the eastern border of a city where eight million are still sleeping, a thick russet blanket can be seen gently hovering just above the rooftops. As light breaks, the blanket begins to rise, stretch, and lift into the blue sky, dissipating until it is little more than a faint haze. Twenty minutes, brief and graceful, the skyline releve has concluded. Morning has arrived in Bogota.
Climate Change, generated mostly by human intervention, is changing the natural patterns of our planet in notable ways. As climate change progresses, changes in weather and landscape are performed by the natural environment. These changes manifest in explicit sensory spectacles, many of which are accessible to public audiences around the world. Like human-made artworks, these nature-engineered opuses bear an intrinsic, affective impact that reify community through collective experience.
SMOG BALLET AND OTHER WORKS documents the anthropogenic impact and the correspondent environmental response in specific sites around the world where environmental performances of climate change are made visible through active phenomena.
This research asks: Is Climate Change an environmental performance of resistance to the Anthropocene? In what ways do humans, production, waste, and the environment co-create and perform together, and what agencies are prevalent? What can understanding Climate Change as a performance offer in the realities of non-reversible environmental impact? How do we understand embodied experiences of environmental transformation and solastalgia?
This research has been shown/performed at CATR in Toronto, Stockholm Resilience at the Resilience Center, and FERAL in New Zealand