SPCUNY Artist
Chloe Smolarski
Collaborators
Chloe Smolarski and Tasha Darbes collaborations include the research-based art installation When Home Leaves You: Immersive Oral Histories of Climate Change and Adaptation at the Swale House on Governors Island, Community Response / La comunidad responde, a participatory media lab that trained multilingual youth to be oral historians of COVID-19, and the documentary Admissions: Student Stories from Undocumented America.
When Home Leaves You: Archiving Living Memories of Climate Change
This evolving project by Chloe Smolarski and Tasha Darbes offers a generative approach to holding space for living memories of climate change. Adaptation and resilience depend on our ability to process the past—and this can only happen if we choose to remember. When Home Leaves You presents an interactive, layered and embodied experience through various pieces such as – an oral history toolbox; a sound catalog; a reflection table – to create an immersive archive and multimedia installation. The project invites the public to share their lived experiences, positional analysis and imagine looking back from the future as a means of guiding the present.
Images courtesy of the artist
The exhibition offers a space of witnessing and co-creating. Visitors interact with archival material and objects as interlocutors, as they observe each other learn and respond to the stories of climate change effects. Interviews featuring the voices of Steven Holler (Alaska), Malik Haider Ali (Pakistan), Susan Kinne (Nicaragua), and Florencia Chang-Agenda (Brooklyn) reflecting on their own experiences and discussing the tools they are using to address climate change in their communities. The testimonies suggest that the experience of climate change lies between the collective and individuals, and that it is a complex process to which we are bearing witness.
Through associative layers of sound design, natural objects, participatory techniques, visitors are prompted to ask themselves: How do we remember what we lost, how do we grieve, and how may we use this as seeds for growth and continuation? Witnessing as an act of reactivation–we mark what we lost, we mark what we can preserve and remember, and we mark what is important to preserve. In addition, we are invited to add our experiences as well. The exhibition includes Recording Living Memory of Climate Change co-produced with Mary Mattingly, and the Graduate Center’s New Media Lab. The piece invites us to contribute to this evolving Public Record by sharing living memories which will be deposited into a digital archive. The archive grows, and the archival materials become interlocutors during and after the visit, thus providing new affordances as we collectively process the effects of environmental degradations and map out ways to move forward together.
Events
Choosing to Remember: Climate Change through Embodied Witnessing and Co-Creating
Remember: the planet is an archive. On April 24th, join together with people of different experiences as we engage the climate crisis through art, embodiment, and conversation. Participants will interact with archival material as interlocutors, as they observe one another’s stories of climate change effects. This assembly will contribute oral histories to an archive of collective grief, as we recover the past, acknowledge the present, and dream about the future of our climate. Embedded within and inspired by the exhibits Holding Water and When Home Leaves You: Archiving Living Memories of Climate Change our space centers collective grief, as a way to transcend alienation and imagine responses.
Poster by Abygai Peña
Photo courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of Annabelle Heckler
Image by Daniel OBrien
Cinthya Santos Briones