“To be silent is not neutral”: Curating collective action at The Climate Museum

Anais Reyes and Dilshanie Perera in conversation with Katharina Anzengruber and Elke Zobl

The climate topic is huge and has so many aspects. You’ve already mentioned the fossil fuel industry and the inequality issue. Do you focus on different aspects at the same time, or do you go from one issue to another organically in your work?

AR: We are purposefully expanding the conversation around climate because it allows more people to join in it. By connecting climate with inequality, fossil fuels, visual arts, poetry, politics, or other social issues, we can better connect with people’s personal experiences, interests, and values in ways that they might not have realized before. Through that, we can shift more people toward participation in and mobilization around the issue. When people think of climate change, the stereotypical imagery conjured up is distant polar bears and melting ice. That’s a very incomplete and dangerous frame through which to understand climate change. Climate is connected to the air, water, and really everything immediately around us; we need to understand and address it as such. In order to address the many geological and social impacts of climate change, we need to expand the public’s perspective of the issue, and in order for people to take action, they need to feel that emotional connection to the issue. They have to realize that they are a part of this; that we are all a part of this. Surely, climate change will affect people unequally, but it will affect everyone. That, combined with the urgency of the situation, dictates a lot of what we decide we as a museum need to talk about. Our decision to use our most recent campaign, Beyond Lies, to talk about fossil fuels and the power that they have to stall climate progress was inspired by seeing TV commercials from oil companies and being blown away by the audacity of their greenwashed messaging. In the U.S., so much money goes into fossil fuels. So much is spent keeping the industry alive even though more and more Americans, according to recent studies, consider the fossil fuel industry responsible for damages in communities and for climate change. That’s an issue that we created a program around because it was a conversation growing in climate circles, and we wanted to help continue to grow it in the public sphere and we knew we needed to highlight it.

You also mentioned the issue of inequality earlier. Could you elaborate on that a little?

DP: Beginning in January of this year, we launched a virtual discussion series called Talking Climate. It brings together interdisciplinary experts who are working in climate and thinking critically about the intersection of climate and inequality. Each month we host a conversation focused on different themes at this intersection, including grief, infrastructure, health, the law, identity, and more. We’re examining questions of long-standing historical inequalities, how they shape what we see and experience in the present, and the ways that climate affects and exacerbates those inequalities. For example, the first event we hosted was a conversation on multiple forms of climate displacement that featured the work of journalist Vann R. Newkirk, who has written about the impacts of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast, and Shavonne Smith, Environmental Director of the Shinnecock Indian Nation (located on what is currently known as Long Island, New York), who has been working on questions of managed retreat and what an entire nation does as their land is being eroded by the sea. We also discussed climate gentrification happening in Miami with Marleine Bastien, Executive Director of FANM, who is focused specifically on immigration rights and stopping the climate-caused gentrification affecting the Haitian community in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood. Food systems were another topic of conversation: How is nutrition changing in a changing climate? How are farmworkers affected in terms of their daily experiences doing the work of agricultural labor? How is climate change creating greater heat vulnerabilities for farmworkers and how does that intersect with public health, immigration, and the law? The Talking Climate discussion series really aims to think through the nuances of climate and inequality and their effects.

AR: We also like to work with artists who address inequality through their work. For example, Mona Chalabi, the artist from our Beyond Lies poster campaign, is a data journalist and illustrator, so she uses her art as a way to explore social justice issues and recontextualize statistics that often feel distant and dehumanized. Her work looks at the intertwined systems and structures that we live in and examines their effects across society. When connected to the topic of climate, the artwork serves as an entry point into an interdisciplinary understanding of climate impacts, how we got to where we are today, and what we need to do about it.

Dilshanie Perera, Anais Reyes, Katharina Anzengruber, Elke Zobl ( 2021): “To be silent is not neutral”: Curating collective action at The Climate Museum. Anais Reyes and Dilshanie Perera in conversation with Katharina Anzengruber and Elke Zobl. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 12 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/to-be-silent-is-not-neutral-curating-collective-action-at-the-climate-museum/