Flooded
2017large-format digital archival prints
6' x 9', 4.5' x 6', and 6' x 4'
Honolulu Biennial, Waikiki, 2018
Collaboration with Heami Lee
Food styling by CC Buckley
Set and prop design by Rebecca Bartoshesky
Flooded, a photo essay and multisensory installation exhibited as part of a new initiative of annual programming presented by Honolulu Biennial Foundation. Flooded fuses climate change landscapes with food, and reveals the intimacy between our collective pasts and our possible futures. It is a means for rendering abstract potentialities of climate data and scientific predictions into something sensory.
Inspired by sea level rise and coastal flooding, the work oscillates between the dystopic and utopic, exploring ideas of adaptation, solastalgia, and baseline shifting—how we react to change over time. The work grew out of considerations of generational or cultural amnesia, the ethical complications (and potential erasures) of adaptation, and speculative visual anthropology. That is, it functions as visible shadows and future artifacts of our changing planet.
Baseline Shifting is a term (and theory) coined by Daniel Pauly in 1995 and it broadly implies when slow change happens over the span of multiple generations, groups of people have a tendency to unconsciously set new “baselines” for what is considered “normal,” thus shifting how one evaluates the magnitude of that change. In each generation, or span of time, one might only see small change, even if the system as a whole is changing substantially. The past “baseline” may be forgotten, and this leads to collective amnesia of what is normal. Pauly’s theory has largely been applied to ecosystems, but can be expanded to many phenomena occurring due to climate change, and, I argue, cultural phenomena like foodways.
This work adds to the existing interpretations of baseline shifting by helping to visualize these types of elusive environmental change over time, using food as a medium through which to connect gaps, and reveal similarities, in future and past adaptation.
Location photography was taken in areas threatened by a rise in sea level, particularly a low-lying wetland town, entirely suspended on stilted structures, in coastal north-eastern Colombia called Nueva Venecia, and the east river of New York City.
Recipes:
Desalinated Water
Oysters with Slippers
Seaweed and Sea Kale Caesar
Jellyfish Salad
Burdock and Dandelion Root Hummus with Sunchoke Chips
Fried Potatoes with Chipotle Mayo and Bonito Flakes
Clam Stock
Mollusk and Broth with Mustard Greens
Whole Roasted Hen of the Woods Mushroom
Carob Agar Pudding
Thank you to:Future Food Lab at the Institute for the Future
Bren Smith & Greenwave (seaweed farming)
Billion Oyster Project
Paul Stamets & Fantastic Fungi
"Wildman" Steve Brill, Wild Edibles