In late November, The Block Museum of Art was proud to unveil the results of the Climate Crisis + Media Arts (CC+MA) Working Group’s transformative media-funding initiative. The two-night event included the first public presentation of six original media arts works made possible with funding from CC+MA.
Since 2021, The Block Museum of Art has collaborated with the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs on a groundbreaking interdisciplinary working group intended to shape cultural and political discourses on the climate emergency. CC+MA is co-led by Michael Metzger, Block Museum Pick-Laudati Curator for Cinema and Media Arts, and J.P. Sniadecki, Professor and Documentary Media MFA Director, representing a unique collaboration between scholars and media-makers across six campus units.
“The Climate Crisis + Media Arts Global Working Group exemplifies the Buffett Institute’s mission. We want to spark interdisciplinary and international collaborations that generate new ways of addressing global challenges,” said Deborah Cohen, director of the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.
“This capstone screening represents an extraordinary blend of creativity and critical insight into present experiences of the climate crisis and the natural lands and ecosystems it threatens. We’re excited to celebrate the accomplishments of this new network of artists, activists and scholars and to refocus climate discourse on threats that aren’t years in the future, but are happening right now.”
Beyond screening existing media works, CC+MA set a goal to cultivate a global network of artists and scholars considering climate change. CC+MA circulated an open call in 2022 for applications from filmmakers, media artists, and scholars across the world seeking support to produce film and media art that illuminates stories of the present realities of climate change in innovative ways. They received nearly 200 applications from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America, and islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The 10 successful applicants have joined the group’s collaborative network and received up to $10,000 to be applied to a new project or in-progress work in film, video, sound art, installation, or interactive media to advance the group’s mission.
“The work that we’re presenting is the kind of adventurous, formally expansive nonfiction cinema that is really at the core of our programming,” said Metzger.
The November 21st program, titled Sanctuary Stations, included the films Heaven in a Wild Flower (Jesseca Simmons), The Cave Without a Name (Jessica Bardsley), and Sanctuary Station (Brigid McCaffrey). November 22nd‘s screening, Forecasting, included The Entomologists (Jiayu Yang), A Very Bad Wizard (Courtney Stephens), and Stray Dog Hydrophobia (Patty Chang and David Kelley). The four other works supported by CC+MA funding will be screened later in the academic year.
The films screened at the November showcase programs emblematize unique modes of approach to the climate crisis, said The Cave Without a Name director Jessica Bardsley.
“Most of the works, I think, are really much more complicated in terms of their relationship to an idea like climate or crisis,” she said. “I think these films in some ways each have a different kind of entry that is very different than what you would get from more mainstream documentary that just addresses the climate crisis.”
In under-completion film The Entomologists, for example, filmmaker Jiayu Yang explores a familial history with waxworms alongside the insects’ potential as high-protein food source and eco-friendly waste disposers. Larvae of the greater wax moth, the caterpillars voluntarily eat polyethylene, a long-lasting and commonly used plastic.
The dialogue and filmmaker connections fostered by the CC+MA showcase event allowed Yang to connect with another filmmaker: Jesseca Simmons, whose Heaven in a Wild Flower deploys stunning macrophotography to visualize the mite-sized world of bees at a massive scale. The filmmakers discussed equipment and other ideas that Yang plans to use as she completes The Entomologists.
“I think it was really good to know that there’s this cohort of people who are interested in similar kinds of experiments as I am,” Yang said. “It’s a very nice affirmation of my interest and the meaning of it.”
CC+MA funding offered filmmakers critical support in their unique approaches to documenting the climate crisis. “The 10 funded recipients are coming from a lot of different backgrounds, but collectively, they demonstrate our commitments as a working group to developing new languages of film and media to address some of the most urgent issues of the climate and bringing a sense of creative possibility to these areas that are sometimes quite frightening or unprecedented,” Metzger said.
The funds offered a critical resource for ambitious cave explorations in South Texas that feature in The Cave Without a Name. It allowed Yang, a Ph.D. candidate in Documentary Arts and Visual Research at Temple University, to balance her filmmaking with her studies. And for Courtney Stephens, whose A Very Bad Wizard explores unstable geographies and the features of Southwest Kansas’ skies, it helped facilitate two trips to rural Kansas during storm season and gave the project a sense of affirmation.
“The vote of confidence is really critical,” she said. “It’s quite valuable when you’re doing something that you work on for years and know there’s no pot of gold at the end of it.”
Projects supported by the Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group include:
Jesseca Ynez Simmons, Heaven in a Wild Flower
An exploration of the bees’ exuberant world, along with their dire situation, through magnification. A document of poetically interpreted science geared towards reaching audiences in a different way.
Jiayu Yang, The Entomologists
An immersion in the rhythms and overlapping ecologies of a small family insect farm in a rapidly growing urban-fringe area in southern China, exploring the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world, climate change and sustainability and the urban revolution in China.
Sebastián Pinzón Silva, Kikuyu
A film that denounces the way in which the grasses have taken over the American continent and have devoured all kinds of native species that previously provided food and regulated the cycles of the different ecosystems.
David Kelley and Patty Chang, (Stray Dog) Hydrophobia
Set against the backdrop of the United Nations Law of the Sea and this year’s meeting of the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica, the film imagines a more-than-human relationship to the seabed; a relationship between minerals, animals and machines and visiting humans in the hydrocommons.
Jessica Bardsley, The Cave Without a Name
A poetic essay film that shows that the night’s wonders—bats, stars, dreams, rest and punk rock—are key to healing the damage that capitalism continues to cause for humans, nonhumans, and their shared environments.
Lisa Marie Malloy, Shunfeng’er
Starring the famed Taiwanese actor-filmmaker Lee Kang-Sheng, the film weaves together narrative modes of filmmaking with experimental engagements with other-than-human subjects, such as submarine detection technologies, whales, the ocean and the diverse ecology throughout Taiwan.
Courtney Stephens, A Very Bad Wizard
A feature-length documentary that traces the history of weather prediction from magic and the Farmer’s Almanac to big data and, in doing so, brings awareness to ways in which agricultural communities depend on and interact acutely with weather knowledge.
Brigid McCaffrey, Below the Big Grove
A feature-length film that contrasts stories of deliberate solitary retreat with portraits of collective communities amid the landscapes of Mendocino County in northwestern California.
Erik Nuding and Kendall Fitzgerald, With Their Backs to the Sky
A collaborative film bringing together a team of artists and scientists following the Ekipa Fanihy bat research team and local bat catchers as we explore the threats of habitat degradation, disease spillover and bat/human conflict in Madagascar.
Ben Russell, We Have Always Lived in the End Times
An observational approach in documenting the everyday of an intentional community of squatters, eco-activists, farmers and militants in northwestern France to better understand how the success of a radical ecological protest movement can offer a path through the climate crisis facing us all.
