 So waterline exhibition all around you really takes a deeper look at some of the issues surrounding water, mostly in the US but also internationally. And all of these artists are taking somewhat of an activist stance. I think bringing awareness to these issues is really important and bringing it to the forefront. It's kind of the first step in activism. But I want to know, I want to ask and learn, what are the next steps? What can we do to make a difference beyond just bringing out awareness? What can we do to effect change? So tonight we have a great opportunity to have a dialogue with Lyndon Kaczek and Matt Jenkins, who both have a lot of experience and ideas around social action and activism. I hope they'll take advantage of their insight and have dialogue with them, share your responses and comments and questions as they're talking tonight. They both collaborated on an artwork that's in the exhibition. We have an easy way around that piece over here titled Water from Flint, Michigan, and I don't remember the date. June 10th of 2017. Lyndon Kaczek was the National Infrastructure Campaign Manager for Food and Water Watch. In that role, she supported and helped lead Food and Water Watch's campaign work to develop long-term solutions for our nation's aging water infrastructure. She also worked on water privatization, bites, and water affordability before trying to engage Food and Water Watch. Then she worked for Clean Water Action where she organized local, state, and federal environmental and electoral campaigns. Oh, that was a question. Lyndon earned her bachelor's degree from Michigan State University in Resource Development and her master's degree from Florida Institute of Technology in Environmental Education. Matt Jenkins is an assistant professor of art at MSU Denver and an active artist working in socially engaged art, performance art, video art, internet art, and environmental art. His work focuses on a variety of explorations into history, cultural studies, the American Southwest climate change, and environment, feminism, technology, and critical race theory. Quite a broad span. His work was shown nationally and internationally. He holds a BA in Art and State University, an MA in American Studies from the University of New Mexico and an MA in the Virgin Digital Practices from the University of Denver. Please welcome our speakers tonight. Well, thank you, everyone. So Lyndon and I have a plan to show you and sort of talk to you about some basics, tell you a good story. And we're also hoping to have some kind of dialogue if you guys have some questions and answers. So we don't want to do an additional kind of lecture, but we do want to get started. Kind of tell me a little bit about the work and about the plan. I'll kind of start with a beginning from my point of view of the show. When I first heard from Cecily about the show and the idea behind the show, I thought right away about the plan. And I thought to myself, let's get some water from Flint here, so my hands are working. And I can be honest with you in the sense that at the time I almost wasn't thinking of it as a work of art. And Cecily, I was just kind of thinking of it as something that needed to happen so that we could sort of materialize the discourse around the water, polluted water and stuff like that. So I started reaching out on the internet to people I didn't know, researching the Flint story that came across in a polluted water watch webpage, emailed her and said, can I ask you to help me with this dark project, which is I need water from Flint and I don't know what you're going to use it. So we went back a lot of ways and said, I think it's a great idea to go into Detroit in a couple of days, right? So we had the map before over coffee and in a way came back with some acknowledging about this pool of water that you see over there on the pesto in a picture with the glass. So this water came from the home of Melissa Mace, who's a really well known activist, one of the leaders of the Flint story. And it came from her top, from her case to sink in June 10th of this past summer. So that's fresh water from Flint, Michigan. Did she start with Melissa? Yeah. Okay, so she's kind of a third contributor here and you don't have to excuse me. I'm going to go back and forth between the lab and PowerPoint here. Let's hear it out. My name is Melissa Mace and I am a resident of Flint, Michigan. I'm also a mother of three wonderful sons and a clean water activist. For the past three and a half years, one residents have not had access to clean, safe or affordable water. For the past two and a half years, my son and other amazing Flint residents have been fighting this. We've been fighting against the water shutoffs as well as the poisoning of our water. And not just from lead. There are cancer-causing disinfection byproducts. We have so many carcinogens in our water. Lots of chlorophore, which of course is one of those movie things that you don't think would be in your shower, but we have that. But the most alarming is we have really high levels of very dangerous pathogens in the water. So for people who have compromised immune systems, like the poisoned, it is very dangerous to take a shower here in Flint. So we have to stand up and we fight, but we don't just fight Flint. We know that it's not just happening to us, but we do know that if we do not stand up and fight for our rights to clean, safe, affordable water, that no other city is going to get fixed if we don't. We know with all the attention that one has gotten, which has worked some good some bad things, that if they don't fix us properly and do what's right by us, they're not going to do anything for the next city that is poisoned or the city that's currently poisoned. So we fight. We fight in the labs. We do water testing. We have had to learn science inside and out, especially when it comes to water treatment and water chemistry. We fight in the courts. We've got five lawsuits because the State of Michigan appointed us is not going to do anything to fix us out of the goodness of their hearts, or they would have already. And we have to fight in the streets. We march. We protest. We get in front of our legislators. We go to D.C. We go to Lansing. We go all over the place to fight. And I am fortunate enough to travel to other cities and states having water problems as well to teach them how to organize and how to fight back. Because you are your own hero. You don't sit around and wait for a knight in shining armor to save you because that will never happen. What happens is when a so-called expert pops in, they can take away your narrative and control of the entire crisis. So retain your expertise. My basic advice to anyone and everyone is to go with your gut to stand up and fight that your voice, every single voice is important and that you are the expert in your crisis. So no matter what it is, whether it's clean water, soil, air, it doesn't matter any kind of human rights violations. You stand up and you fight. You have it in you whether you believe it or not. Don't wait until you are poisoned like we are. Like my sons are. Like I am. Don't wait until you're too tired and too sort of moved to say, hey, something's not right here. Look at us. Look what's been done to us and what's still happening. We are in the 1,243 and counting. A scary situation. But you stand up. You fight. You fight for yourselves. You fight for your rights. You fight for your neighbors. And you fight for your children in the future. Because if that doesn't change, nothing changes. Water will be completely treated like a commodity. And the one thing that we have learned from Flint is when water is treated like a commodity, people die. I want what are you fighting for here in Flint. And you can find me at W-A-T-E-R, water, youfightingfor.com. I'm on Twitter because I'm kind of clever. And I also am the project director at Fun Rising, which is focused on building community power. It's something that every single city that's going through every kind of tragedy needs to do. The power is within the people. So remember this. Stand together and stand strong. Thank you. And please, please, don't forget about Flint. And hopefully it never does, but if this happens to you, we'll stand with you too. Thank you. This way. Okay. No, just over a second. Oh, this is hard. And Flint, if they need, I'm going to put it right here. So this is 20% of the world's available fresh surface water. It's right here. They're surrounded by it. So I think it's really interesting that in a place that's so surrounded by all this fresh water that folks in Michigan, so many people in Michigan go without. It's not just Flint. There's massive water shutouts in Detroit. There's people who live without water because there has a voice of hindrance in the agriculture, or there are wells that have been poisoned because of gravel mining. It's widespread throughout the state. And it's really, I think, when you look at a map of the Great Lakes, it's kind of staggering the people living in the middle of all this water and not having access to it. So here we are in Michigan, surrounded by 20% of the world's fresh available surface water, but it's not safe in Flint. And what I wanted to post the first question into y'all is, what are the implications of that? Whether you live in Flint and you turn your faucet on and it's not safe, or whether you live in Detroit and you turn your faucet on and that thing comes out because you can't afford to pay for it. What are the implications for that for your daily lives? Same here. We were just looking for the ability to just go in and faucet anywhere and get lots of water for thirsty, but... Right. You just, you know, you can drink something. But there's a... Yeah, drinking, because I think that's actually one of the first things to think of. What are other things that you can't do if you don't have a capitalist resource? So it's essentially like watching anything, like it blows your dishes yourself. And it's kind of a listen, like when you really look at your daily life, like how much is surrounding by water and if you didn't have any, like how much of them didn't feed it. It's almost like, you can't cook. Like one thing that I've learned from there's this woman that I've ever but been to Detroit in the cold is she's telling me, she's like, you know, well, what's cooking like? And she's like, well, we don't eat rice or pasta because we would never make anything that absorbs water because then you can't reuse it. So that's one thing that I think of. And like with kids, you mentioned that you can't bake. Well, can you imagine what it's like to go to school if you weren't able to take a bath in the morning and wash your clothes? Like this type of social stigma that comes with that or not being able to tell your teacher that you don't have water because then they have to report it to human services. And you can be taken away from your parents. So beyond just not being able to drink, there are staggering implications for not being able to have water coming out of your tap and making it something that we don't necessarily think about right away. We kind of think about the drinking aspect. In Melissa's case, she mentioned the showers. That is a huge problem at the point right now. So, just you mentioned the water form. Corian is something that is used to treat water. But when corian comes in contact with organic materials, all their chemicals are created. And in the United States, we don't have standards for what is safe to bathe or shower. Other countries do, European countries do. We do not. So, a lot of people in the United States stand from the gases that are coming out of their showers. So, I can probably say here that one of the crises is destroyed for offers. So what I talked to Matt about is that one of the things that has been really important in both of these crises are imagines. And they've been a really important way to tell a story about what's happening and raise awareness about what is going on in these cities. So, I thought I'd start with this one because if you could go with my water crisis, any artist who sees me is going to go off with this. This is kind of like, this image now is explained not in this way that's going on. So, I thought we would start here. So, this is essentially a timeline. These are the things in my head of what happened. We are not going to go through this, but it's here. And so, I wanted to hit on a couple of key points. And the first is the very first thing that happened in 2011. We had a new governor coming from San Michigan. One of the very first things that they did is pass an emergency manager law. And what that did was take away so if a community or a school district was cash strapped that the state could come in and help them get their finances in check. And what it did is it took away the power of the mayor and the city councils. So, they were essentially like a dictatorship. This happened in both Flint and Michigan and all the communities that happened were predominant in the communities of color. And one of the very first things they did in every single community was try to privatize the water system because the water system was a community that was not set up. So, the emergency manager law was really important. It wasn't an emergency manager that made the decision to switch to the Flint River in 2014. I'm sorry. Sure. So, I really want to have you play the video about it. We'll let Amy Benjamin kind of explain for a democracy now special. Thirsty for democracy. The poisoning of an American city. In 2 April 2014, an unelected emergency manager appointed by Michigan governor, Rick Snyder, switched the source of Flint's drinking water from the Detroit system, which they've been using for half a century to the corrosive Flint River. Officials thought they could say something like five million dollars. Soon after Flint residents were complaining about this colored and foul-smelling water which was causing a host of health problems. First, the water was infested with bacteria. To treat the bacteria, the city poured in chlorine which created a cancerous chemical byproduct called trihalomethase, or TTHNs. A deadly outbreak of Legionnaires disease which is caused by a water-borne bacteria then spread through Flint, killing 10 people and sickening dozens. At the same time, underground, the Flint River water was corroding Flint's aging pipes, poisoning the drinking water with lead, which can cause permanent damage, especially in children. Well, this past weekend, we went to Flint to learn the remarkable story of how Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and other officials ignored and covered up residents' complaints for a year and a half. Right away, people noticed that something was wrong with their water. It was just color and it smelled. There was a tree boy of advisories over the summer. The first sign of fainting was that the General Motors in October of 2014 recognized that the water was corroding their parts. So they switched back to the beach-riot water system. So that was really early on. In February, so a few months later, the University of Michigan in Flint, they tested the water on this and realized that the water wouldn't see for their students to drink, so they started providing a lot of water. I came, I got involved a little, probably around that time, because of water rates and unreportability, but it was typically called A, when I got Melissa to manage my agency, that I really got involved in the crisis. At that point, they still weren't doing anything. We delivered a bunch of petitions at the end of August to the mayor's office, and I'll show you an image of that. And the day we were delivering the petitions, in minding their telling us the water's safe to drink, there is no problem. A water truck pulls up to the city building and takes them in watercolors because the people in the building were not allowed to drink the water. So they did. They got reconnected to the water department, the Detroit water department in October of 2015, but unfortunately what had happened was the pipes had been so corroded by the water because they weren't using corrosion controls that their water's still not safe to drink. And that's kind of where the situation remains, is that they took down, it's called a suffer, even though they switched back to prevent the proper corrosion controls. And the pipes are just so badly damaged that in some cases where people don't even have a lead service line coming to their house, they've got high blood pressure because it could be from connections or solder, but the whole system now has to be replaced. So they've gotten, there's several lawsuits that are kind of moving forward. In November of this past year, the state was ordered to deliver water door to door, and they produced to do it. Congress has given them $170 million that was allocated last December, but they still haven't received the money yet. So the state of Michigan hasn't straight placed the pipes, but they're not actually, they're not actually sending the money yet. The state also gave them $128 million. But again, it's a slow process. It's going to be at least another three years before all the pipes are replaced. And then the one other thing that I want to note on the timeline is that there was a plant advisory task force that was put in place, and the machines of the right commission did an investigation into the crisis. And both of the reports showed that racism played a role in the plant water crisis, which I think it did. If this would have happened in one of the wealthier suburbs, it would have been taken care of. So yeah, so like I said, I think images play a very important role. Any of the issues I think that I've worked on over the years, and I mean, this is one that is particularly staggering is how water from different homes is like. And this water is coming out of people's homes, and their city, their state is coming from there. And so when the folks in Detroit and the folks in the plant met first on May, they realized right away that there was a big connection between the two communities. And so the activists organized a walk. And they walked from Detroit to Point over the course of 10 days. And this is when they arrived at Point City Hall. So this woman, Lila Cavill, was an amazing water activist. She actually was Rosa Parks' personal assistant for 30 years. She's amazing. And she did a lot along this and Melissa. And this is that. Maybe not all of it in life, but it's a powerful image. As well as this, Baxter, he's another, an Amy and Juan Moria, a key role of her. This is us delivering almost 30,000 petition signatures to the mayor of Flint, asking them to switch back to Detroit's water system. And we tried to get a meeting with the mayor for weeks. And we could not get a meeting with him. We showed up at his office. That's him. He's not here anymore. I was driving back to Detroit. After this happened, did I hear the call of myself? Oh, it was the mayor. Apparently. If you show up at 30,000 petition signatures, you can get a meeting with him. So I think it's just a testament to show that, like, when you get organized, you can get people involved. We put pressure on people to do something we can do. But sometimes the things that happen when the news finally broke. So the thing I'm really kind of the catalyst, I guess, that brought a national and international awareness, the issue was a physician from the Flint area realized that there was an increase in bloodline levels in children in Flint. And that was significant because even though it was only 3% increase in blood levels in children, had been declining for about two decades, so it reversed in trend. And that's when everyone started paying attention. And one of the first things to happen is that trailers, trucks, like, from all over, you know, this fraternity in North Carolina or this, you know, choir in New York, people were just from all over the country to be huge some like this called Bob of the Water to Flint to help. Which was great. But it makes you think who is getting rich off of the water reasons? Yeah. So another player in the Flint story is Nessie. So Nessie has that's the third one? The third one. Yeah. Nessie has purchased for almost nothing, right? Yeah. The right to pull water out of an aquifer up towards Lake Superior? Ah, Lake Michigan. So, and wasn't that the wife, the wife of one of the mayor's chief of staff? The wife of the governor's chief of staff, Deb Von Schorn, is the lobbyist for the bottled water and the oil and gas industry in Michigan. She's instrumental in getting them exempt from Michigan's water laws. And they play a significant role in this city. To you we'll talk about some of our music. I'm Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now special thirsty for democracy, the poisoning of an American city. Well as Flint residents are forced to drink with an even bathed bottled water while still paying some of the highest water bills in the country for their poisoned water. We turn to a little known story about the bottled water industry in Michigan. In 2001 and two, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality issued permits to Nestle now the largest water bottle in the world to pump up to 400 gallons of water per minute from bottle furs that feel like Michigan. This sparked a decade long legal battle between Nestle and the residents in La Costa County where Nestle's water wells are floating. One of the most surprising things about this story is that in La Costa County Nestle has not really required to pay anything to extract the water besides a small permitting thing to the state and the cost of a lease to a private landowner. In fact, the company received 13 million dollars in tax breaks from the state of Michigan to locate the plant there. The spokesperson for Nestle in Michigan is Deborah Muchmore. She's the wife of Dennis Muchmore that's Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's Chief of Staff who he just retired and registered to be a lobbyist. When we reached out to Nestle for comment to the story, we didn't speak with Deborah Muchmore, but we did speak with Jane Lass and the Nestle boarders who said, quote, we're deeply invested in the Mesquite River and watershed and its sustainability on water use is always permitted and compliant with the permitting authorities. But residents in La Costa County have another story to tell. So let's take a look at Nestle and the battle over the Great Lakes which are closely governed to offer prices. In fact, in the beginning there was a currency that was roughly $20 million that was set aside to provide all of the water and much of that came with the spice bomb. So here you have Nestle taking water from Bert Gray and then selling it back to the state. So now the taxpayers are paying Nestle to provide water to Flint on the ground for a crisis in the state. So it's just if you go I was able to get on fully well I really like this image but they were many workers that had been working in another country and then came to Flint to help. For the name of the Flint they've been previously distributing water in something that you see everywhere in Flint maybe from the city building to my thing or wherever you go and it was interesting for me the first time I lived there like going to the bathroom and like you can't wash your hands because you can't use the water so there's like a lot of water everywhere you go and even just recently when I was there to get the water this summer I we were out I was out going to with Melissa I think it's also one of the things that have to happen right away all the children under 6 in Flint need to be tested to make sure that they have with it although to do it within a certain amount of days for your number that was one thing to do to raise that for the children this I've been here so this is the Detroit Light Brigade and they've gone around we've gone all over the state and they greatly stand with their water boards and their light board to call attention to different issues and so when they'll they'll take them down the street and they see an hour top of the inner state with their light board so just to bring awareness this is so this is another picture you can go up you'll see it but it really I think it's these kids were great I grew up with them for a little while they got it you know it was really interesting and they were so proud of their signs like they're not helping up their signs but they came up with the things that they wanted to write on that no he gave a bunch of money to Flint I here remember he's a musician he's a musician isn't that? he's seen what you remember and the other thing is when they first started providing water you had to go but you still have to go to a fire station to pick it up and this wasn't a journey and when I was going door to door many of the people that I talked to were I would say the majority of people I talked to because we were in section eight house were women they were seniors and they were equal color and every single one of them they were not going out in 20 degree weather to go pick up water so they have you know friends and neighbors and family who were helping to you know get them the water but if you didn't come apart you might have wanted to pick it up eventually they allowed you to take a place that's typical for what we need people and you can only get one case for a family hurting so people are having at least couple of days to pick up their bottles of ice not the water is what it was this is a photo that was National Geographic this is probably one of the papers it's just another really striking photo of kids and when we think of people going together that are you know get their water every day and they have to go to a wall to get it to think about their world country and that's what's happening every day but it's been like just for a few years and so this is World Water Day we went to the Capital of Lansing and it's water activists from all over the state but predominantly from Detroit and Detroit this is the moment Nicole I was talking about because we can't cook rice we don't have water to eat too much and she's she's been she was without water she's up her times I think the longest was for like four months but she's been very willing to tell her story so in addition to photographs being really important storytelling is really important in this and then there was a big justice march in Detroit so we all marched together it was just another way to get the word out and this we were in a water section but there was also climate justice and there was a section for air quality issues in Detroit so there was like a whole different life and we kind of brought up the water and include this here because one thing that people don't think about when you think about the water is the pets and how they're involved and so they can't drink no water either just like a child who has a small body can help him drink you know our pets are significantly smaller and so the lead impacts that you know more as well and so figuring out ways to make sure that you have bottled water for your pets and one of the things I think in one of the shots for any women there is a billboard that says don't boil your water and so that was something that people did in the beginning when you boil it actually concentrates the lead and so it's that's what people were doing for their pets but you know I think this is the last month I love this damage because I think it's pretty substantial like first of all but she has never stopped fighting and she's you know she's I was telling that other days she's really billed but she travels so much talking to people about this and working for a solution like tirelessly she like universities and so I think that this image is just an opportunity to her and it shows her spirit in a second do you guys have any questions for us just wherever you're about to play in the next story what happened how many of you guys do you know about the link before this and do a lot of other stuff how many of you about Nestle and they involved with their yeah anybody from play when she generated it you know okay so this is oh sorry who's mayor now like who's governor who's a mayor so same governor for just another two years Peeley you didn't want to become governor mayor of Detroit you're both the same no so the so the new well I'll start with Flint so Flint got a new mayor Karen Lever she has been she's been great she's really accessible I think she was thrown into a spotlight she could never have anticipated like how many things we're going to get and what exactly that burden would be for her but I think she's done a really good job but as you know with me Flint is going through they have the mayor and city council are all for election in November and it is very contentious there right now and you know because so little progress has been made in terms of actually fixing the pipes there's a lot of you know finger pointing and whatnot so that's kind of where that is the governor is still the governor he has not been indicted on any charges although 11 other government officials have been in that the state count for the local the county of the state and federal level of the EPA and so only time will tell if you know what happens with him but he has masked a huge amount of money for his defense should what happen and it's all tax payer dollars and the mayor of Detroit is just a whole other city I guess I'll be about that later you mentioned a lot of finger pointing yeah I think there so there they have started replacing the pipes and it's just it's a slow process and they're trying to do it in a way I think that's really mindful so one of the things to consider is that when you replace the pipes it if you're just replacing the service lines and the main types and the system people sell blood pipes in their homes that have been destroyed so those need to be replaced but if you drive down the street and plant in a lot of neighborhoods there might only be one house or two homes that actually have occupants in them so then there's what would we do with all these other homes who could be contributing the problem and the water city and the pipes and what we learned from Washington DC so DC had their online crisis in 2004 is that if you do it's called a partial line replacement so if you only replace some of the lines it actually makes the lead problem worse because you're disturbing the lead and the other pipes so there is you know there is a plan but they also don't know where all the pipes are so that information was recorded on the 3x5 index cards and so they're trying to figure out where actually the pipes are so it's slow going they only have a few months a year where it's really good water to do it so that's kind of what that seems yeah I think considered a temporary water system you would think one of the things that has been argued is that instead of providing bottled water because it's really not easy to shower or clean your house until it's all bottled water so right now I'm going to close and fill those up but you know and I mean they're connected to a safe water source now it's just that the pipes are so deteriorated that you know there's always a lot of things you know very far back yeah and I think that that's somebody contact us from North Carolina that he can sell the system but I think that it's just to be able to do it for everybody it's just some people do I think harvest water they borrow water they go outside the city to like shower or wash their clothes I mean people have been so resourceful like it's really making coffee and blend because she just asked me to bring water because that would save so that you can catch the water that water really vacuumed so they did Obama in January 2016 we appealed to the Department of Health and Services to declare a public health emergency they did that because that would actually bring up a disaster and unfortunately the way that our system is set up is that it's a natural disaster if you keep working come in you can create all this money so we said that in blend that a lot of houses are currently abandoned for that kind of thing like they didn't show you where it's already happened no and so the cities are really similar they were both automotive cities so it was GM it was a really successful city until GM started posing for plans and moving operations overseas and so now it's a city of less than 100,000 people some of the activists that I spoke with recently is if whatever it means under 100,000 people then the county can step in and take away certain things and so what I've heard and I don't know how there is they kind of want to redevelop and make that it's more in college town where it's a box and exciting things like the downtown area and then what that does is it's very into it's having to portray the people who live there forever so that seems to be where the city is for play part of the problem though is that people can afford to leave because they feel in their homes so you can't leave so Food and Water Watch actually did a survey of the 500 largest water systems and we found that for drinking water it found that of those 500 communities like residents were paying the highest drinking water rates of any of those 500 systems and it was about 800 dollars a year for drinking water what do you think was the cheapest drinking water in the country? give me because this is shocking yes Phoenix there is a problem in the middle of the desert with the therapy I can't remember what their rate was but it was the cheapest of the 500 was being so here you have Flint in the middle of the Great Lakes Phoenix in the middle of the desert you can play around that so they were paying for it the partial rate so for a while they were getting a 60 and they should say their water rates were illegally raised 35% in September of 2015 a judge agreed with that ordered them to be decreased and then later that on week spring they were given a 65% credit on the water bills there was a temper in the auditorium and then just this past spring so they had that out in here before the state took it away because they said oh the water's all good we gotta pay for it and so not only did they search for people off for nonpayment but in May they foreclosed on the 2002 residence for nonpayment of water bills because in Michigan you can tie the water bills to your mother yeah actually this is a four and three monologues that had in my office before this piece the state probably starting in 2012 or so I started to put on a project that I called fracking field trips so you know I started seeing these commercials on the TV many of you probably seen them with a color of like gas matches and say you know fracking's not a big deal everything's fine so my thought was well if that's the case then let's just increase the field trips and head out there and see these commercials just kind of cutting out the representation so a lot of times we make art but also time we make art there's something maybe that's conceptual or historical or theoretical or died and then we produce a representation that we don't even tell that story so fracking field trips I was basically trying to collapse concept and form in a sense I was trying to compare her who's well known for saying that she is not interested in art about the things she's interested in in art that is the thing and so this a project I think he was hoping for something more beautiful than clean water but I see the clean water over there in the same shape this is a piece by Pedro Reyes and this is in Mexico City basically what this is is a health clinic a mental health clinic just run by people no actors just run by the community so early in this talk there was a race saying you're the expert in your crisis and I think that's done something that's been occurring you see it happening in the art you see artists starting to maybe overstep their maps and start to work so in other words instead of me making a video about the story I could just bring the water here but following the lines of Pedro Reyes the next step would be as a work of art we're going to start doing our own water quality tests in our communities so so Reyes and Lucara both have some of these similar ideas and I know there's few other students in the crowd here I could just be theoretical for a moment this is Antonio and in the beginning of the of the book here he talks about this this anthropologist named Michael Towson who wrote a bunch of books in the 80s and Towson has all of his research was in anthropology but one of his after was the relationship in society between people and the state someone to read this will pass it for you so there's a long ancient question about my logic Towson was a former doctor from Australia and in 1982 he wrote a book called The Nervous System so what he did as a anthropologist is he started looking at like Reyes he started looking at clinical clinics with the health care industry and the medical industry so he wrote this book called The Nervous System and in the book he basically uses a nervous system as a theoretical sort of structure to talk about the medical clinic cannot contain or resolve or deal with and so the nervous system is that so let's see using some of the examples taken from this period in the medical field Towson demonstrates one of the main problems facing our society this is in 1982 is what he calls quote the reification of the consciousness of the patient another of Towson analyzes the way medical practice lies in between a quote cultural construction of clinical reality and the clinical construction of culture a quote he considers his patients bodies as mechanics to suffer from various dysfunctions of defining the sick of ill objects to be repaired to contemporary technologies of healing healthcare following his point of view patients are not considered individuals who can express the form of reaction one might say of fatigue to social city registered physical symptoms they are simply realized as most of the global exchange so what Ray has been saying in the clinic here is that as an artist he's tired of patients being in service of the clinic he wants the clinic to return to being in service of the patient so when I see how the clinic is the same exact number the body of a participant is in service of the state the state made all those decisions in fact lying to the treatment citizens the treatment based on its own mind has a profit making for sure this is kind of a theoretical understanding between with the piece it's kind of interesting too if you go if you know any ceramics who are studying any in pottery if you go on the lab and you google vessel or base you'll notice that throughout many cultures a picture like that has a neck has a belly has a tongue so one of my sort of things that I'm interested in with this piece is water water never really leaves a watershed on the planet we have the same amount of water that we'll always have when we pollute our feet between it's always going to be the same amount and when we drink water our our bodies basically absorb that water right so there's a sacred bond between our bodies and the vessel throughout thousands of years in various cultures has been defined as a metaphor for fun so I think there's something really nice and rare I've got a few examples of some artwork here and I'll have the names written down but this is a piece that's deep water rising so these are some other artworks recently that maybe think of ways into creating water kind of the way that went into the show this is a really famous piece this is January one of the 1997 I think to raise the water I think what he's saying here with this piece this is a little bit more very conceptual the way I'll stand here to comment a big group of people who try to raise the water but this is to raise this work and it's participatory it's collective and it's essentially a social action so I think this kind of falls in line with what Melissa may be saying and we have to be the experts in our own crisis if we look at the news what's happened recently with Harvey and Irma we saw it with Katrina if you're talking to anybody down there people on the ground are taking care of themselves I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist here but we're the point where our steam is not doing what it needs to do in fact it's going quite the opposite so I'm seeing a sort of similarity between recent contemporary art practices that wanted to part from representation of the beautiful representation of the poetic and start to enter into that civic reality but we have to take care of ourselves and set up our own structures this is one of the main things Nestle the Nestle situation and this is obviously Coke but here we are we may think we're drinking Coke but actually we can follow Towson's theory about the lyric system and the body politic and that's open trail we're all laying face down with a coke bottle before it's done and then this is this is from 2007 I believe this is right before Dr. Ty Wallsby and this is a Danish design collective called Superplex and they did a series it's actually a really interesting video they called Floodin' McDonald's somehow they got their hands on more or less all the materials from the older McDonald's recreating as a film set and then flooding it and they have this art statement which is like we're hearing so much about sea level rise and all this stuff so I think they just kind of wanted to flip the script and show us that the same sort of corporate causes of potential flooding and sea water sea level rise that we're going to have are going to flood those spaces which most people flood houses for that kind of thing so yeah I've been interested lately in any time like this sort of clouds one of these concepts so with the water just having appeared in one sense it's a way to get to Modena and hear the story of what we're doing today have many kinds of talk and tell us the details that piece is obsessed with the beginning is probably just just the beginning of what artists can do most of my practices of artists are really not interested in this situation of the gallery much more interested in being out in public in the business trying to accent the business I know this is kind of weird for an art professor to say but I feel like there's a state of crisis for art by now it's revolving around are all of our old ideologies and telling stories that I think are being called a question this last slide I actually I would be probably pretty interested probably get this one kind of I forget what he calls it but this is Ai Wei Wei right so we can probably know Ai Wei Wei he was the one of the architects on the first house in the Beijing Olympics he's probably one of the world's most famous artists and this is a performance scheme that I believe drops I believe this is how it happened but it's a it's a a main dynasty piece right so there's a lot of ways to interpret this piece but one is just in the China context that keep hanging up for the Olympics there was so much gentrification and scraping of buildings that this is essentially what China is doing to itself for the Olympics but I also think as an artist to me this represents the metaphor of breaking the tradition kind of just dropping dropping the old ways into the working and moving on so the other thing I wanted to share with you these are just kind of some of my influences with this piece as an artist some of you probably know Lucy but hard she's a really well known writer and artist and has written for many years this is a book called Undermining a Wild Life to Land Use Politics at Heart in the Changi West it's not exactly it doesn't quite fit what we're getting with here and doing the West isn't much more of a as an artist it's really easy to work with the West I'd love to see a book like this about that piece but she's got a nice passage in here what she talks about right a little bit so an increasing number of artists after this are taking up the Land Use Challenges not just shooting photographs of undermining the big deeper so to speak into the underlying issues she's alone with the song and the grammar school and the portrait in Montana is this definition industry is useless without culture this is something repeating what she sees in Montana a message is still resonating in this post-industrial age culture is a far broader term in part in canon race social canonity is not yet recognized as a and that's something I may have said as an artist as an art teacher is trying to stay in that wider culture living in and sort of figuring out what are those situations that something you might not recognize as art but that's bringing you into art school it's much contemporary art that is divorced from the popular expectations of both fine arts it's a major way of seeing sometimes more connected to or embedded in life than previously expected while a timely visual arts with the total realities of our current environment some artists are realizing that they can envision alternative futures and produce competitive and restorative vehicles which which is open cracks in the world and we don't think there will be no manipulation artists are good at separating between institutional blocks walls to expose the layers of emotional and aesthetic residence in our relationships to place they can ask questions without worrying about answers and then she goes to continue on to talk about her similar look delivered to the local which is 1997 and she talked about writing about conceptual feminist and political art as a scapegoat and I think in some ways when I talk about art being a crisis of representation now piece of the way as a scapegoat when the installation was happening here Anna was working for days and days and days on this beautiful installation and I came to pour some water from a point into a base you know and then kind of went to lunch in a way that's kind of my own my own scapegoat but I want to finish here with what she's where she's doing so she's concluded that the opening of the scapegoat would be a free ourselves from the limitations of preconceived notions of art and in doing so I'll say the plan so you know a few years ago we had a once in a thousand year flood in 2013 here he opened the show quickly in response to the floods and I wrote an essay from Canada on that show and it was an interesting process talking about I was working with an editor I didn't know I was working with an editor but there was an editor who was reviewing my manuscript I kept getting my manuscript back with these comments like I don't understand why you're saying this you know you can't write about art in this way so one of the things I was saying was that these floods and this is known to climate scientists they're breaking all our bottles we literally don't have bottles what's happening to us so that means our economic bottles are going to break our environmental bottles are going to break our religious bottles are going to break and all of those are going to break and why we're not part of the lot is also great so in the essay now we have the answer here in the essay I'm calling you the question how does it go we're going to live under these circumstances art has to totally change its psychology and something else and I think emerging to activism is going to just be necessary and sort of I don't want to get organized or stuff I know I didn't want this talk to be like too much of a heavy hammer or too depressing I do teach a classical social media art at MSU Ember I taught it down for six years it's the only social news I've passed I did an undergrad in New York City in the state of Colorado so this is what I do this is kind of what I'm working on this is page one page two would be some sort of something that looks like Peter Ray is a sanatorium and so we're all we're all sort of being experts in any crisis today we've asked about the art and I just kind of I love that you remind me of all of my theories and I wasn't going to be looking at you because I'm trying to compare you can find out about what you want but she's not current at this there's a topic that I would like to manage one is it's called political art and it's basically her position and I can tell you a little bit more about how to compare some examples of her work she started out with performance artists similar to me trying to embody the work so that's that's the common you have to see with social media artists a lot of us early on started doing performance art we do performance art but basically you know you're critiquing the live between artists hardly so that binary of artists hardly is a really lively but she started sort of taking a step further so in New York she opened up a promo now a lock-in for people to be involved in immigration issues as a look-alike she used a grant funding from Grog Road to set up this job she organized a charity so they started running this free lock-in online immigration so that's the actuality she's interested in I guess I'm getting more of a chance and last year she was the she gave an address at the school the audience and she gave that so there's a translator that would have said but also also so she's going to be her main way and finally his idea of the nervous system would be another chance to really kind of out there to apologize and to read the nervous system in 1982 turning people abroad Australia being on a ferry coming into I think Brisbane or Melbourne had an immigration checkpoint and getting out of this ferry and there's this immigration checkpoint and there's like all the buildings and there's a narrow central chain that's going through this immigration checkpoint off to the side of the CCPD on the wall turn it's the CCPD but he starts equating the structures of the nervous system with those types of checkpoint second immigration checkpoint so that immigration checkpoint is where our social body starts to become nervous that structural sort of design or putting bodies through the checkpoint is starting to click and become sort of unmanageable and measurable and that kind of thing so he's thinking that the state and capital has co-opted us essentially and our functions are in service of it so maybe projects like this or the people that have been playing if you think about playing they tested their own water you know they started literally doing everything themselves which is a way to stamina that time with the state right? I mean they would be trained by the state and lied to so they have no choice but what I'm saying is we've talked about this in terms of the role the heart plays in activism it's crucial because it's a way to make an issue more approachable to more people and so when we can talk about the performance aspect of it I think about you know we're as an organizer you're always trying to get media attention for the issues and everybody wants to like you call or report it they want a visual and so that has been something that we've really worked I think even more so over the last like five or ten years to integrate into our campaigns and some sort of performance or some sort of visual because that's what the media wants and then that helps you in turn tell the story about whatever it is that you're working on so it's crucial to be able to do that Any other questions? Any other questions? What else? It's also a little bit conceptual actually which is you know I'll explain Why didn't you guys use the microphones? Sorry it's a vibration really I think it voices so much I think it was wonderful information wonderful content but I wish it preferred at all I'm sorry well I'm having to talk now it's really nice anyone that that's going it's just really we just kind of forgot the extension it's a wonderful presentation yeah so you know a few months ago I started sketching out some ideas and I think I would like to figure out a way as an art project to teach myself how to test air quality water quality and so I mean it sounds it almost sounds too heavy to say but if anything creativity sits on top of these very basic human needs but also maybe creativity just do a certain self into understanding those needs so I like artworks that are participatory where audience members have a stake in the work and can have an impact on the work so yeah some sort of some sort of climate like what Pedro did with the sanatorium you know when we can start to become experts in a crisis and then you know because I'm a professor I'm always doing research anytime I can connect with somebody outside of my field you know it's always really important just in my life so learning how to test air quality air quality water quality how to teach some people yeah the fracking field trips I mean that happened over two or three years period and then just kind of I just headed out going out to see the fracking to see fracking sites if you've been north of Denver you're going to see a fracking site it's kind of a ridiculous notion there are just there's thousands of them when I went for a few years to different groups of people we would take take a bunch of cars and go out and just get out and take one and start walking around and taking pictures of it sketching it you know that kind of thing so I don't know I don't have a specific next grade art idea answered for you it's unrelated it's unrelated politically but similarly artistically but this two summers ago I started working on a project I made the world's largest PDF so I also do I do get a lot of internet art so I went on the web and just found every PDF I could download they had the world's largest in the title in the description and if you've ever used the app about it you can just combine multiple PDFs and export them as a new PDF so I exported this like 16 gigabyte world's largest PDF it's a little different but for me the logic is the same there like as an artist like taking taking the idea in the form or something and trying to just fold it into into one thing yeah kind of interested in these fracking filters you were talking about were they wells that were currently in the process of being fracked and drilled or were they already just yeah so we were only able to go to one drilling site so I would describe them in kind of three ways you'll see how to drilling sites if you drive along 9.25 or 7.6 or something those are typically the ones that are fencing really that sort of obstetric fencing it's like two stories high the kind of fencing they'll use when they put us all in like a camp someday fencing like that so there's active drilling sites once it's drilled it's kind of hard to tell whether the site whether the well is active or not sure one other thing this is just like Nestle but how easy they get their hands on the aquifers oil and gas industry they well they can go horizontally first of all so they can go down to the well site and then it's like having five shots in your coke and then once they go down they can send types horizontally to other locations and then go down the only way to really tell if a well is active is if a gas truck comes to pull gas out of the storage tanks or at night you see those active wells burning out the methane emissions which is skyrocketing from the front range and now I'm measuring methane in Rocky Mountain National Park something like five or six times it's a historical average so if that methane cloud you can be living here remember it's already going to the mountains what they do with that sort of speculation is they it's still cost efficient for them to drill but they will just about randomly drill and if they suck oil out of a well for a while it's no skin for them to just shut it down and leave it so the next phase for those of us who've been in Denver and Colorado frankly will be a renegotiation of what used to be one of the very agricultural areas north of Denver it really is now essentially a Burmese oil field so that's the kind of long answer to your question so we would go to all three of those sites and how do they react to you taking photographs of the sites so the one time we went to the drilling site and they were actually drilling such a huge project I don't think they cared parked on the side of the road and got out and did venture the site somebody did come out and we asked them some questions and talked to them only one other time did we have somebody stop by and we were out on the dirt road really close to the Alburton headquarters so this is also folded into the oil and gas story and we have a story we have our story for two so a guy came by and bought an Alburton truck and one of the people I was with who used to be a professor here in the films used to teach photo she had hopped the fence and was taking better photos and she could have developed the fence into the well side and this guy got by the truck rolls down his mingo and asks us who we are and this is the fun part about being an artist just say I'm an artist which is like official but what does that mean so he was sort of taken back by that but he asked us why we didn't have hard hats and so we were able to get into your conversation to think about the suppose of safety but he was you could see in his body language that we were endangered by being on the site yeah so that's the one interaction there's an interesting connection to you between crafting and water so it's very even especially the plant so on average one of those horizontal models it's about 5 million gallons to crack it although depending on your substrate it can go up to like 25 million gallons of water that water is so toxic well first of all you want to get about 75% of that back that you can't use it they can't right now we don't have the technology to mean it so it is then injected back into the ground in these injection models which are the ones that are causing earthquakes and we can't use it so it's taking it completely out of the watershed forever and in Flint where they were so the reason they switched off the water system the safe water system to begin with was because they were going to build a new pipeline from Lake Huron to Flint and part of the reasoning behind that they think is to crack for natural gas and oil in North America Michigan so all yeah yeah when I was out there doing factory field trips what men are saying is something true you'd also see you'll see huge piles of sand occasionally like sort of like an empty lot and there'll be piles of sand there's several stories I this is sand they put in with the water the chemical mix and it's the pressurized water-saving chemicals that actually crack or crack with shale sand releases so all that sand apparently a lot of that sand is coming from southern New Mexico but it's also coming from the Driflus area in Wisconsin which is another the Great Lakes area that's a big glacial gift essentially all these lakes and all these aquifers but also those glaciers push the whole bunch of sand up into this area in Wisconsin and it's the Driflus area that sand's being stripped mine we tried to call it out of dunked on an empty farm and then ejected into fracking wells so somehow we decided that not only should we totally agree with this water it makes it toxic beyond measurable human time but the best thing to do is just inject it into the ground and don't worry about it for a while so yeah so what's the difference in giving each of the aquifers not putting on this kind of good thing in cases in our career or something they do so the walls themselves are they should be double walled but the thing I mean with any of this like we saw deep water rising you have a person or people that are doing this and you know humans are valuable like you can make an error or that somebody can crack and so there's nothing really you know it's whatever it is it just makes you wonder about landscape art for example should we all go out to the fracking area and just implant airplanes you know this is what I mean about the crisis for all of our notions of studying some beauty of the supply of the supply and all these things that we rely on to view experience art they're all holding their environment and that's being destroyed and therefore I think the language of art is really important the language and the experience of art like everything else and becoming increasingly vulnerable so the only way the only way to adapt the only way to survive is to be shifted somehow you know essentially as artists and art viewers to somehow be on the ground from what we've always done to be on the run meaning like what are the discussions and methods of languages we can come up with to deal with the current the day-to-day occurrences that we're noticing I know it's not the kind of art that will help me read like the title of the back and the cheers like you know where do you go back you know I'd like to buy that you know I think it's a very interesting because very much it's a very similar very important message that was trying to brought across through our work so in a sense you're trying to be the same thing through the activism yeah but I feel like I can look at this like when I stress an idea of some sort in this I'm not just saying but I've always created the time and being pulled out from being too little or like right you know yeah and kind of across that oh totally I mean there's I struggle as an art student actually there's this kind of implicit assumption that you have you kind of across as an art student for a lot of art professors that whatever the thing is the job that they already see is actually to recreate the thing you know and I guess that's exactly what you're saying so there's this way of looking down on actuality you know even though we've got definitely a legacy of realism I mean practice you know and value and that of realism can be heavily masculine really alive in real days and what does that even mean you know so yeah I totally that's been a lot of my experience if you read that Tanya Bergara singing on political art she addresses that and she actually addresses that in her commencement speech at the school of the audience to see all of her experiences being told you're not on the right path as an artist your idea is going to be I've read that about Jenny Holzer I've read it about my own way you know so maybe the trick to being an artist is to ignore I don't know you have to trust your instincts I guess you know I'm just going to buy that you know yeah what is the what do you see you know this is a different you may not assert serenity for a future like that particular piece right or our society yeah you can kind of buy it so that you have the yeah socially engaged art kind of as a field has become almost trendy and you see like now as a program you can have a face as a social engaged art as a class or even as a concentration the good thing that's happened in the last there are a lot of institutions that are starting to become involved in terms of funding so there are grants there's publications there's peer-reviewed publications so there's some tendency happening in the social engaged art flip side of it is a lot of social engaged art right now is sort of too positive so it's solutions oriented so artists are going to come along and address this issue and so this you see this in the city of Denver a lot of cities started funding social engaged art project but only in ways that tie into the narrative that the city wants to have when a lot of really good social engaged art frankly just throws a brick through the window you know it's pretty antagonistic at least half of the field is somewhat antagonistic like what I wave five way ways and some of the more bold artists aren't offering solutions to problems they're just using aesthetics there's some grants and there's some things happening so there is there is a financial world that you can live in if you're an artist or an artist it's never going to be the you know it's never going to be the you know the black type of thing don't think but yes but yeah well thanks for coming out and trying to get you guys thanks for having me thank you go go go go go go