In conjunction with the Aspen Ideas: Climate conference taking place on Miami Beach May 9-12, 2022 the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and City of Miami Beach will present a series of temporary site specific public art commissions, film screenings, and performances highlighting issues related to climate change and sea level rise. Fifteen (15) Miami-based artists will present work, including visual artists Franky Cruz, Cara Despain, Morel Doucet, Brookhart Jonquil, Michele Oka Doner and Lauren Shapiro. Performances and will include works by artists Dale Andree, Brigid Baker, Michelle Grant-Murray, and an audio-work by Gustavo Matamoros. The film program will include artists A.S.T. (Alliance of the Southern Triangle), Dale Andree, Domingo Castillo, Coralmorphologic, Hattie Mae Williams, and Lee Pivnik. In addition, The City of Miami Beach will also highlight works from their permanent public art collection with thematically related commissions by Bill Fontana and Ellen Harvey.
Aspen Ideas: Climate is presented by The Aspen Institute, a global nonprofit organization committed to realizing a free, just, and equitable society. In collaboration with the City of Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County and a diverse group of partner institutions in and beyond South Florida, the Aspen Institute is enlisting global and local policymakers, scientific experts, corporate leaders, inventors and innovators, artists, young leaders, influencers, and engaged members of the public to participate in Aspen Ideas: Climate 2022.
ASPEN IDEAS: CLIMATE
VISUAL ART, FILM and PERFORMANCE
May 9 through 12, 2022
Visual Art Program
Franky Cruz- Miami Beach Botanical Garden
On View May 9-12
The Vivarium Meconium Dome Lab (VMDome Lab) is a smart, butterfly-rearing research center within a geodesic structure that connects art, science, and technology. The dome, created by Miami-based artist Franky Cruz, features a habitat of nectar plants to support native pollinators like the Gulf-fritillary, Zebra Longwing, Giant Swallowtail, and others. Select butterfly larvae diligently raised by the artist within the dome will contribute to a process at the artist’s studio. There, the chrysalis are suspended in a grid over watercolor paper, and the meconium that is naturally secreted from the emerging butterflies splatters onto the paper, acting as a sustainable, natural pigment. Cruz is influenced by the architecture and philosophy of Buckminster Fuller, driven by a sense of efficiency and a keen understanding of nature’s limited resources, and drives the idea further to incorporate the small, intentional gestures that ultimately contribute to healthy ecosystems that support life.
Cara Despain- Miami Beach Convention Center (Swimwear)
Botanical Garden (Fashion Show)
On View May 9-12
Fashion Show, Monday, May 9, 7:30 PM, Botanical Garden
Plastocene Swimwear Line created by Miami-based artist Cara Despain intervenes in the problematics of clothing and fast fashion swimsuit industries. Using the body as a billboard for the destructive exploitation of the planet, labor, and single-use plastics, the suits feature original photographs of ocean trash and pollution that illustrate the consequences of consumer culture. Made with Repreve fabric from recycled plastic bottles and locally produced, the suits are a challenge to luxury and leisure industry practices and a call to action. Available for purchase in a pop-up shop within the conference, and presented during a Trashion Show reminiscent Miami Swim Week, net proceeds will be donated to local marine conservation organizations. The work continues on with the end user who purchases the swimsuit, spreading the message as they wear it throughout the world and embodying an interventionist eco-tax.
Morel Doucet- Miami Beach Convention Center, 4th Floor
On View May 9-12
For Aspen Ideas: Climate, Miami-based artist Morel Doucet debuts a series of new ceramic figurative busts and sculptural installations that explore Miami’s ecological landscape and black culture, tracing the intersection of climate gentrification and fragility of the region’s marine life. The installation with series title Daughters of the Copper Sun honors the female matriarch of the family unit, acknowledging the multiplicity of roles that women take on in Latin and Caribbean cultures. Doucet draws inspiration from his ancestral homeland Haiti, the world's first black Republic. Exquisitely embellished with various indigenous flora and fauna found throughout the Caribbean, Doucet’s works make use of the French Rococo style of architecture and décor to highlight a powerful record of environmental decay that mirrors economic inequity, the commodification of industry, personal labor, and race.
Brookhart Jonquil- Miami Beach Botanical Garden
On View May 9-12
Paradise by Brookhart Jonquil is a large-scale sculpture in which a live tropical ecosystem is situated inside of a saltwater-filled prism. The sculpture points to the growing precariousness of the relationship between ocean and land. A second participatory work, Multiplication Portal, requires participants to labor for the benefit of a small plant. This sculpture invites participants to share their own water with plants living in an aquatic propagation station in the form of a prismatic rose window. The work draws from the future-oriented engineering aesthetic of NASA while following in the ancestrally-oriented tradition of ritual objects, and asks that the water be offered along with immaterial properties such as reverence, connection, purpose, and goodwill toward the world ecosystem. The work situates the participant between the past and the future, right now, and asks them to make a small but heartfelt communal action toward an expansive scope of achievement. Please 1: Approach and observe 2: Generate a feeling of loving care for these plants and the world ecosystem. If this is difficult, begin by creating those feelings toward a dear friend. 3: Decide that the following action will result in a world ecosystem of dynamic thriving abundance. 4: Pour a small amount of water in the basin.
Lauren Shapiro- Royal Palm Hotel
On View May 9-12
Lauren Shapiro presents a large sculptural intervention on the lawn of the Royal Palm South Beach. The work, entitled Site-R16 Transect 1 refers to a now-extinct coral population, memorializing it in the form of dimensional clay tiles stacked inside of a gold-framed monolith. With this work, Shapiro memorializes an ecosystem similar to South Florida’s own coral populations, cultivating an awareness of these fragile environments.
Please join the artist at the Royal Palm South Beach on Tuesday, May 10, from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. for an artist reception and tour. Please meet at the Front Lobby Compass Rose Bar. The artist tour will begin at 6:15 p.m.
Film Program- New World Center, SoundScape Park
(Following WALLCAST of Plenary Sessions- approximately 9:30PM)
A.S.T. (Alliance of the Southern Triangle)
Intertidal (12 minutes)
The term intertidal refers to the coastal zone that lies above water at low tide and below water at high tide. It is the liminal contemporary condition in which we understand Miami to be, as well as a characteristic of coastal cities around the globe. The video presents a voice from a future Miami already subsumed by the tides, trying to transmit a message through to our present. ‘How do we let them know we are drowning?’ we are asked, via an overload of sound and image flashing through multiple futures, all in urgent need of care and attention.
Dale Andree
Such Rooted Things, (15 minutes)
The film Such Rooted Things, related to the performance by the same name within the Performance Program, considers the effects of climate change through a generational lens, addressing the importance of community through the inclusion of interviews of women across the county. The work was filmed in the mangroves at Miami’s Matheson Hammock park, the roots become the metaphor for our need to support one another.
Domingo Castillo
Tropical Malaise: Prologue
Tropical Malaise: Prologue is a site-specific film examining life on earth 500 million years in
the future, post-human existence. Speculating the impacts of climate change, the film is
constructed from hyper-produced, high definition tutorials on worldbuilding. The film’s screening site location upon Frank Gehry's New World Center fulfills two important issues central to the work: he technological underpinnings of fantastical architecture designed and only possible through advanced technological tools, and the inherent form-follows-function principle where the specific building codes required to withstand the destructive weather potentials South Florida dictate structural, aesthetic considerations and potential uses of the building itself. Through these constraints and lenses, Tropical Malaise: Prologue considers both the internal and external forces which shape the possibilities of reality spanning geologic time. Commissioned by Art in Public Places, Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs.
Coralmorphologic
Coral City Fluorotour (5 minutes)
The Coral City Camera is an underwater camera streaming live from an urban reef in Miami, Florida. It is located along the shoreline at the east end of PortMiami in about 10’ (3m) of water. It was deployed by Coral Morphologic as a hybrid art-science research project produced with Bridge Initiative and Bas Fisher Invitational and initially funded through grants awarded by a Knight Arts Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Hattie Mae Williams
Mother Of... (7 minutes)
Film, Mother Of... dreams the effects of spiritually, physically, and energetically transmuting nonconsensual violent earth offerings of our ancestors, children, and loved ones both human and non-human, through blood rituals mandated by women. How has our complacency and participation in violent energy and offerings towards our earth effected the elements?
Hattie Mae Williams invites the community to process their relationship to the elements and how climate change, patriarchy, capitalism, and racism has lent a hand in the exploitation of nature and people. Through themes of dream mapping, Yoruba folklore, site specificity, and bodily autonomy, Williams hallucinates a new world and way of living.
Lee Pivnik & The Institute of Queer Ecology
Metamorphosis, 2020
Part 001: Grub Economics, 14:54
Metamorphosis, a prelude and three-part film that aims to help catalyze a planet-wide transformation from the prevailing extractive relationship with the earth to one characterized by regeneration and care while remaking ourselves and our relationships—to each other, and the world. Metamorphosis aims to restructure how the world is imagined and how it operates today, modeled after the life cycles of holometabolous insects. Metamorphosis is narrated by Mykki Blanco and Danny Orlowski and commissioned by DIS.
Performance Based Works
Brigid Baker- Miami Beach Botanical Garden
Monday, May 9, 4:30PM
Brigid Baker will present a version of her new work Numinous Land. Incorporating dance, music, and hand-worked fabrications from mediums such as such as papier mache and found items, Numinous Land speaks of stewardship of the earth and of regaining the dignity of materiality lost in a campaign to transcend nature - to conquer, to separate ourselves and to be mistaken about our place in the order of things.
Michelle Grant-Murray- Miami Beach Botanical Garden
Tuesday, May 10, 4:30PM
Michelle Grant-Murray presents a unique version of her performance work RoseWater, a choreographed dance ritual that explores environmental racism as the root cause of generational gentrification, carbon footprint, and water ethics.
Dale Andree- Collins Canal Park
Wednesday, May 11, 4:30PM
Dale Andree will perform a unique version of her performance work Such Rooted Things in Collins Canal Park, related to the film by the same title. The piece was originally created in the mangroves of Matheson Hammock in Miami, Florida and was influenced by the reflections of Miami women of multiple generations on their response to climate change. It connects our human stories to the environment by using the mangrove forest as a metaphor for our need to create connection and community in order to protect the fragile ecology of the systems in which we live.
Sound Art Installations
Bill Fontana – New World Center, SoundScape Park (Daily)
Sonic Dreamscapes, 2018
Sonic Dreamscapes presents a sound and video installation created for both daytime and evening viewing via SoundScape Park’s sophisticated 72-channel Meyer sound and projection systems. Sonic Dreamscapes is the culmination of intensive research and a lengthy series of field recordings. Two years of exploration, supported by Art in Public Places and the New World Symphony, has yielded multiple versions of the artwork, allowing visitors at SoundScape Park a different experience with each visit. Trained as a composer, this work marks Fontana’s first collaboration on a public commission with a music institution. Sonic Dreamscapes is Fontana’s third major public art commission in the United States, following Soaring Echoes for the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park and Acoustical Visions for the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th anniversary in San Francisco. His works abroad have been publicly installed at the Tate Britain and Tate Modern, The Venice Biennale and MAXXI in Rome.
Gustavo Matamoros- New World Center (Interior)
Sound artist Gustavo Matamoros will design immersive multi-channel soundscapes to activate key areas of the conference. The work will be composed of original recordings captured over a period of 15 years at Everglades and Biscayne Bay National Parks. Presented in chronological order, these sounds communicate the progressive shifts in population density and location of living creatures in the Everglades from 2004 to the present.
