What does a future filled with social justice and environmentally friendly practices look like? Artists featured within our current exhibition, Beyond the World's End, offered up a number of scenarios to this very question. They've introduced new ways of envisioning the broad social, cultural, political, and ecological changes on the horizon. Highly relevant and timely before, the concepts featured in this exhibition are now hitting a little different due to the ongoing COVID pandemic.
Until our doors reopen and we can safely visit the MAH again we are excited to bring you this content digitally and take the time to feature the artists found within BTWE here on our blog.
Rasquache Collective
BordersBordados: A Rasquache Time Machine
The Rasquache Collective believes in making do as a strategy for survival. Drawing on the Chicanx concept of “rasquache,” a term of Mesoamerican origin that means re-usefulness, they’ve created a time machine. Made with recycled materials, Rasquache brings together traditional kite-making and embroidery practices.
Adorned with commitments and prayers, these kites offer a means for trans-border communication, also placing present and future in contact. The call and response between the kites and their tails invite you to consider creative means for cultural and community survival and collective thriving.
Make Your Own Rasquache Time-Machine
Reconfigure recycled materials, string, and tiki torches to create kites that transcend borders and time.
BORDERS from federico cuatlacuatl on Vimeo.
“When we create and learn together we are participating in cultural sustainability and resiliency. We are not surviving, we are thriving.”
– Rasquache Collective
Amy Balkin
People's Archive of Sinking and Melting
Balkin’s archive is a growing collection of items from places experiencing current and near-future threats of disappearance due to the physical, political, and economic impacts of climate change. (including glacial melting, sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and desertification). Together these objects form a collection of community-gathered evidence, a public record of present or anticipated loss.
Read Amy Balkin's interview in Bomb Magazine.
"One role, beyond initiating the archive, is to find an approach for organizing the contributions to reflect how climate politics act upon the states, communities, and sites from where contributions have been sent." – Amy Balkin
Browse the Full Archive
Part of this archive is currently on view at the MAH. See what's been contributed around the world and learn more about each piece here.
Fun Fact! As of 2019, the archive contains contributions from Anvers Island (Antarctica), Australia, Cape Verde, Santiago de Cuba, Germany, Greenland, Iceland, Venice (Italy), Kivalina (Alaska), Mexico, Nepal, Miami (USA), New Orleans (USA), New York City (USA), Panama, Peru, Republic of Komi (Russia), California (USA), Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, and Tuvalu.
Read "What Will Have Been" – Interviews from A People’s Archive
Explore the personal accounts of folks living in Antarctica, NY, Mexico City, and more. Learn more about what they are experiencing and why they contributed an artifact to the Archive.
"I wanted to show the world that we have a community down here. Antarctica is not a pile of ice that will melt or not melt at some faster or slower rate." – Micaela Neus, contributor
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