Artists tour Southeast to explore experience of climate change

What does art have to add to our conversations about climate change?

A lot, if you ask the members of the Tidelines Ferry Tour.

“It’s a challenging topic and it’s affecting everyone on the planet,” said Allison Warden, an Inupiaq interdisciplinary performance artist who is part of the Island Institute of Sitka’s month-long tour of Alaska communities. The tour aims to explore the intersection of climate and culture.

“I think the role of art is really to lead those conversations and to challenge audiences to think about what we’re facing,” she said. “Art is able to access the subconscious worries of who we are and take us to places we might not be comfortable in otherwise, and also open up the audience’s perspective in ways that might not be opened by other means.”

“We’re hoping to build the conversation, to let people talk about it (in a way) that isn’t loaded with politics, isn’t loaded with science, that values people’s personal knowledge and experiences and that leaves a lot of room to honor traditional indigenous ecological knowledge systems,” said Peter Bradley, executive director at the Island Institute.

He said the tour grew out of two of the Institute’s long-term programs: its artist residency and Sitka symposium.

“We decided this year to focus our attention solely on the question of climate and culture in Alaska and how they intersect, on the premise that travelling through Alaska with a group of artists who are also exploring these questions might yield some interesting conversations, insights, and give Alaskans an important opportunity to share what they’re seeing, feeling and experiencing as their culture and communities respond to the change in climate.”

The tour began in Sitka on March 30, then travelled Wrangell, Ketchikan, Kake and Petersburg. It arrives in Juneau Thursday, April 14, , and continues on Monday, April 18 to Kodiak, Homer and Anchorage. In each community artists hold two events: a community conversation and a performance. Three artists are taking the entire tour: Warden, Michelle Kuen Suet Fung, a mixed media artist from Hong Kong and Vancouver, and Chantal Bilodeau, a playwright from New Jersey. Joining the first half of the tour was director of Hoonah City Schools Heather Powell and five of her students. Sitka weaver and storyteller Teri Rofkar will join the second half.

“The mix of artists is really rich. Fung is offering a really urban vision of the damage plastics do across the world, but we’re also hearing Warden’s northern vision of how radical the changes are up there as the sea ice just literally disappears and the permafrost loses its steadiness,” said Bradley.

Warden, who was raised in Fairbanks and lives in Anchorage, has family ties to the Arctic village of Kaktovik. “I go there and I talk to community members about what they’re seeing and experiencing. As opposed to here, the effects in the Arctic are much more extreme and noticeable in terms of climate change. That’s a perspective I’m bringing along on the tour — the perspective of the melting ice.”

Warden is using the tour to prepare for a show titled “Unipkaaģusiksuģuvik (the place of the future/ancient)” that will debut at the Anchorage Museum in October. She is also known by her rap persona, AKU-MATU. Her one-woman show, “Calling All Polar Bears,” debuted in 2011 and brings the audience to Kaktovik to hear about the impacts of climate change in the Arctic.

The Tidelines tour is Fung’s first visit to Alaska. “I’m getting a lot of information that I never thought I would,” she said. “I’m just observing everything I can and its just overwhelming, new information every day.”

She has especially been touched by the hospitality of her Alaskan hosts and the experience of Native culture. “I lived in Canada for many years but I never had this firsthand educational experience and this personal contact with them. For them to invite us to share our stories in their ceremonial houses … welcoming and performing rituals for us, I was no longer a tourist but I was inside the circle. They were so generous with their stories, their histories, I felt very humbled by how open they were,” she said.

Fung’s ongoing project involves a dystopic world where “in 2084, China proposes that if animals can learn to eat plastics, why can’t children.” She has already premiered a drawing installation for it and is also working on an animation but she wants to go further.

“In my proposed project, I will write a series of monologues that would portray the interrelationships of (delegates from China, India, the EU, Canada and the U.S., her hypothetical G5) that will in turn weave the geopolitical map of 2084 and how it is affected by climate change.”

Bilodeau is working on a series of eight plays called the Arctic Cycle, which will include “one play for each country of the Arctic that looks at the social and ecological changes taking place.” She has already completed the Canada and Norway plays and the U.S. is up next.

At the performance in Ketchikan at the Saxman tribal house, she was really taken by what Saxman chief Harvey Shields and other speakers had to say, “which had to do with the changes they’re noticing in their environment and how people like us, artists, are crucial in getting people to rally and make changes.”

It’s a sentiment Bilodeau shares: “The reason why I started on this subject was because at the time, almost ten years ago, I was hearing a lot of negative scenarios, and though it’s important to understand the urgency of the problem, I think if you just stay with the negative scenarios it is hard to feel any type of hope for the future and feel like we can do anything. So in using the arts, and theater in particular, my goal was to try to give people something personal that they could relate to. To translate the data and all the information into more personal stories and also be able to create a sense of hope,” she said. Through her plays, we will be able to “both grieve for the things we have already lost and be able to fight for what we have and want to keep for the future.”

Climate change in Southeast is “an all-encompassing thing that people are really noticing and struggling to adapt to,” said Bradley. “We’re hearing a lot of concern. People are noticing big, big changes and elders are commenting on changes that are way out of scale with anything they’ve seen in their lives.

“We heard about the about the very warm weather, the very warm winters these past couple years, but we also heard about what that means for subsistence lifestyle, as those lifestyles become less predictable as the timing of the hallmark calendar events in subsistence become more fluid and less certain.”

In Wrangell, he said, “they learned to known when the hooligan were running up the river when the eagles flew over the ice. Otherwise they couldn’t see the hooligan themselves, so they had to watch the eagles. And now that’s not necessary as there’s no ice.”

But there’s some of Bilodeau’s hope, too, in the message the Tidelines Ferry Tour is hearing from the communities they visit.

“In some cases, on kind of a fine-tuned local level, people are feeling optimistic about potential economic gains. For instance, in Wrangell, some people were talking about how this year is the first year that herring have shown up in many people’s lifetimes,” Bradley said.

The Island Institute plans to create, out of the tour, an online hub that “will ultimately be a one-stop shop for people’s reflections and experiences and research on how climate is affecting Alaska,” he added. Our belief is that because people here live such close, deeply entwined relationships with the land that people around the country and across the world would have a lot to learn from Alaskans as they watch these changes unfold.”

 

Know & Go

What: Science & Storytelling community conversation

Where: Juneau Arts and Culture Center

When: 7-8:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 14

During this event, the Tidelines Ferry Tour will pair up with a climate change conference held by the Southeast Alaska Fish Habitat Partnership on April 13-15 in Juneau.

“We’re going to use a slightly different format at this event,” Bradley explained. “We’re going to use the long-table conversational format, which is a facilitative format that allows for an intimate conversation to happen while also holding a performative element. So we’re going to start with a few primer questions and a group of ten people will self-identify to sit around the table. That might include artists, that might include me, that might include people we don’t know or scientists who have been part of this gathering and they’ll start chatting while everyone else watches from rows of seats quietly. And then at any point, someone can stand up from the table and join the audience, or someone from the audience can stand up and tap-out someone from the table and replace them. And so it’s a way of sort of honoring the potential of everyone in the room to contribute.”

 

What: Artist performance: Chantal Bilodeau, Michelle Kuen Suet Fung, Teri Rofkar and Allison Warden

Where: Juneau Arts and Culture Center

When: 7-9 p.m. on Sunday, April 17

 

• Follow the Tidelines Ferry Tour at iialaska.org/tidelines and on social media with #tidelinesjourney

• Any Juneau teachers that would like the tour to visit their classrooms can contact Peter Bradley at peter@iialaska.org.