Digital Photography. I always tell people that I grew up in the
Rockies, and while this is not untrue it could also be leagues
from the truth. My house sits in the foothills, squarely in the
place where mountain and prairie meet I imagine that at one
time my house could have been close enough to touch the
purple slopes, but over time it seems the rift has only grown
larger; the space between since filled by endless highways
and fast-food chains.
My childhood was spent watching the outside world from
inside this box. Picturesque landscapes painted the walls
and floors, but I could be an arms length or a world away from nature and not have known the difference. From the window in my parents’ room that faces west towards the Colorado sunset, only the tip of Pikes Peak is left amid the rooftops. Nature has always been an escape: from pressure, from society, and from hierarchy. The snow-melted canyons do not pass judgment the way that humans do. In our madness, we often turn to the earth to search for divination. For me, the carpets of my home became mountain meadows, the plastered lumps in the ceilings were stars from the deepest recesses of the universe. For all the places I could not be, I visited in my dreams instead.
Contra - antithesis, to understand our lives in a changing world
requires a documentation of the many contradictions that we
simultaneously hold as true; Our own cognitive dissonance.
These artist postcards feature poetry and photography from
my many travels through the Americas - documenting iconic
landscapes that are slowly fading. These postcards subvert the
vicarious tropes of exoticism found in traditional souvenirs.
Instead, (Contra)Postcards offer a new snapshot of a place,
complete with quizzical statements and moral quandaries.
Display these artworks on your bookshelf or contribute in the
global capitalist network and send messages to your loved ones - an inscribed message in a bottle, sharing stories in order to race extinction.
Available for purchase at climigrantssketchbook.org
Siekopai/Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon
Workshops and Photographic Documentation
Pictured here are images I had the pleasure of taking for a
historic workshop conducted by the Siekopai peoples in the
Peruvian Amazon. Many women from various communities all
across the jungle gathered in a the village of Guahoya to
reunite and share ancestral knowledge of their traditional
pottery making to the young generation.
The Siekopai, also known as the Many Colored People, are an
indigenous community that has called the Amazon home for
hundreds of years. They are a vibrant craftspeople who create multicolored garments and speak a unique language. Following a border dispute in the 1940s between Peru and Ecuador, the population was splintered, causing some of the community to flee deep into Ecuador and lose contact with their families. For nearly sixty years, the two groups remained separated until they were finally reunited. Distance between the two groups has made collaboration strenuous, and as these communities modernize, the ability to share and preserve knowledge becomes increasingly more difficult.
The Climigrant’s Sketchbook Initiative is a design research
collaborative that connects Climate Migrants from across
ecosystems through stories, tools, and artwork with the aim
of empowering those displaced by climate change. Our
mission is to provide an all-access and free space for
individuals around the world facing displacement. The CSI
is dedicated to cultural exchange, incorporating climate
specific architectural adaptations from vernacular
construction and indigenous wisdom.
This platform equips refugees, dispossessed, or displaced
peoples with valuable knowledge, strategies, and tools to adapt to the rapidly changing climatic conditions and build sustainable futures, provoking resilience at the scale of the human hand. The CSI prioritizes the role of social services, many Climigrants experiencing scarcity of: food, water, shelter, healthcare access, and employment. As part of the research process, the CSI conducts field studies and in-person workshops. Drawing upon intersectional methods of community engagement, researchers with the CSI emphasize the role of environmental justice in actively combatting inequity felt by the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities.
Learn more at climigrantssketchbook.org
Bioconstruction, also known as biological construction or
bioclimatic architecture, is an approach to building design and
construction that prioritizes using natural materials and
incorporating natural elements to create structures that are
more in harmony with the environment and healthier for
occupants.
Building, on two plots of land donated by city of Atacames,
Ecuador, this new CAEMBA neighborhood of 31 houses offers
a vision of environmental justice. In collaboration with
contractors knowledgeable in the building process, volunteers,
and members of the family who will inhabit these future homes, everyone worked together in the building process. All of it can be done on the scale of the individual, without the need for heavy machinery. The building process is also a learning process, where locals are able to absorb new construction methods that they can apply to other areas of their careers. The houses are light but strong, being made of bamboo. Each house can be customized and changed depending on the tenants desires with a wrench and a hammer, all wall panels can be removed and reoriented, spaces for future doorways are also built into the design. An entire house can be built in a day, also deconstructed and moved.
To ensure community stability, all tenants agree to a binding five year contract where they must remain as the owners of their home, after which they can opt to move or sell. However, families are highly encouraged to invest into their new homes, a safe space for generations of families to live. There is so much evidence that owning a stable home is one of the first steps in lifting families out of poverty. It allows folks to search for jobs, better healthcare, and gives additional time to other luxuries we often take for granted such as making their opinion heard in public office and other social programs that directly impact their lives. In only a week, an entirely new way of living was designed and implemented; a generation of possibility.
Minga, a Quechua term referring to collective work undertaken for the betterment of a community, is a driving philosophy for this Participatory Design project in asscosiation with Fundacion Raiz.
Visual investegations at the site of violence. Nearly twenty five
years since the Rwandan genocide has passed, yet to this day,
the country still struggles creating a unified identity, free of
colonial ties. A divide created by outsiders and perpetuated by
the media, has left the many inhabitants of Rwanda scarred.
Today, children and young adults make up nearly half of the
population of 12 million. Forty percent of the population lives
below the poverty line, and only thirteen percent of the
population has access to electricity. There has been a
disconnect as a result of the genocide, many young people
lacking the stories and history that their culture has been built
upon, the dividing lines between Hutu and Tutsi ever-present. While freedom of speech and press is recognized, there are some exceptions. Many journalists have faced government harassment, especially relating to issues on identity and the genocide, leading many to self-censor. While local publishing houses and artist collectives have risen in popularity, they still remain relatively small and inaccessible. As a response, this architectural intervention proposes a pop-up media center that evades government detection, to allow artisans, journalists, and young people to create work outside of top-down censorship that reaches not only local Rwandans, but Rwandans across africa who have been displaced since the genocide diaspora.
Travel photography and documentation. Overtop the now
defunct mine that at its peak of production was exporting two-
thirds of the world's silver, the capital city of Guanajuato has
nestled into the forgotten veins. With bits of sandstone and
repurposed remnants of colonial Spanish baroque architecture,
tenants constructed a subterranean city, a building process
that has aggregated over centuries.
Print publication. Over time the landscapes of my childhood
have changed, the world I once knew has subsided for another.
Looking back, collecting fragments of memory, I search to
understand the deepest consequences of my relationship to
nature and to my coming of age. To formulate agency in my own
narrative, to weave a story into the walls of my chosen home; a
nest and a language of my own.
52 pp., risograph printed, mylar, found paper
Available for purchase at climigrantssketchbook.org
Social stratification and resetting ecological baselines. The
built (and un-built) environment is tied to speculative cityscapes
based in both alternative futures and parallel presents—cities
are where architecture, infrastructure, and sculpted landscapes
can reflect, reinforce, or transform collective social norms and
individual behaviors. In our speculations, spatial considerations
expand overhead beyond the troposphere and underfoot to
geothermal sources of planetary energy.
Transitional spaces, interfaces, and moments are highlighted
throughout the environment, emphasizing both conspicuous
and collateral connections between different elements of the social and ecological landscape. Because the airspace inseparable from the motivations and behaviors governing terrestrial activity, initial emphasis on the aerocene is effectively distributed and integrated across the ecosystem to reflect a more integrated worldview.
Speculative anthropology is the lens through which we consider how humans might adapt and respond to new aerocene realities, what role they might inhabit within nature-centric systems, and how the behavior and beliefs fostered during this pandemic might shape the societies of post-COVID futures.