 And I would like to just start by doing a land acknowledgement. The MSU Denver Department of Art and the Center for Visual Art acknowledges the privilege we have to gather in this place once the territories and homelands of so many indigenous peoples including the Arapaho and Cheyenne nations both of whom were subject to genocide and forcibly removed from this land. We respect the many diverse indigenous peoples still connected to this land and value the knowledge systems they have developed in relationship to the lands. We collectively understand that offering a land acknowledgement neither absolves settler colonial privilege nor diminishes colonial structures of violence at either the individual or institutional level. Land acknowledgments must be accompanied with ongoing commitments to displaced indigenous and immigrant communities. In order to learn more about the spatial relationships of indigenous communities to lands we recommend visiting native-land.ca and exploring the interactive map. There are many ways to support indigenous people today including through local organizations such as the Denver Indian Center and the Denver Indian Family Resource Center. So I'd also like to thank the MSU Denver Art Department faculty members Lisa Abendroth and Jessica Weiss for their work in developing this statement. So since I'm acknowledging labor I want to also acknowledge my amazing staff here at CDA. Melanie who's just been running around figuring out all the tech she had to leave to go pick up her daughter but she I'm sure would like to be here for this talk but she's our gallery manager and such an awesome problem solver Katie who's our education manager who's engaged our audiences through tours and discussions and also stepped up with this exhibition to work really closely with a lot of our partners. Molly our budget manager who's worked on getting everyone paid and processing all their paperwork and I think she needs to talk to you too. And then Jenna who is our communications manager and make sure you all heard about the exhibition and this talk and of course to our incredible student staff who give their all and do so much to make our space so wonderful the exhibition so meaningful to engage our audiences on a daily basis and some of them even sing during our installations and our staff meetings you know who you are Alison. So we couldn't do it without you and we love working with you I love working with all of you and I'm so grateful to have you. I also want to acknowledge our leadership council who's a group of volunteers who spend time helping spread the word and growing our community so thank you so much for being here and for all the work you do to support CVA. So if you aren't familiar with CVA the Center for Visual Art we are the off-campus art gallery for MSU Denver and we work to promote dialogue about contemporary urban issues through the catalyst of contemporary art. We pose a lot of questions and and dialogue we don't always have the answers or solutions but that's our hope is that we come to solutions. And with this exhibition in particular it was inspired by artist Sammy Lee who did a paper a felted paper mural that depicted a data visualization of food insecurity in Colorado. That mural is was outside for three months in the winter and we've rehung it here inside but that was sort of the cornerstone for this exhibition and a lot of this both of these exhibitions banana craze and cultivate do such a wonderful job of bringing the problems to the forefront so we can think about and ruminate on some of the issues that our society is facing but it can also become really overwhelming and you know when you look at the statistics it's like wow this is really depressing what can we possibly do. So one thing I was really drawn to and love about Desert Art Lab is that they are being really creative about solutions and finding new ways to approach agriculture. So finding solutions at rethinking the way we use land and approach growing incorporating lessons from ancient agriculture and indigenous practices. So I'm so excited here what they have to say. Desert Art Lab is an interdisciplinary artist collaborative co-directed by April okay I'm going to really turn on to what you were last name April Bayorquez and Matthew Garcia whose work promotes indigenous perspectives on ecological practice and climate change. They have exhibited their work in Paris Santa Fe, New Mexico, Santa Barbara, Australia, many other places. They have many exhibitions coming up so beyond the lookout there's an exhibition right now in the springs called Spring's Fine Art Center. They've been guest presenters at the International Symposium on Electronic Art and Haas Stack which you'll have to share with us what that stands for in Lima, Peru. April and Matt were awarded the Creative Capital Grant in 2016. They live and work in Pueblo, Colorado. Please help me welcome them to the podium they're already here but welcome them and thank you all. Thank you Cecily for that wonderful introduction and thank you for the Atlantic Knowledgement. Today we're here to actually share our practice which is also embedded in indigenous Chicanx perspective and knowledge system. So we will... Yeah I really wanted to... Is this working? Is it working? Yeah okay yeah it sounds like it. Yeah it sounds like it. This is a fantastic space it's a beautiful space thank you for having us. We're really thrilled to be here and thank you to Cecily and her team and we'll start. So Desert Art Lab started in Phoenix, Arizona. That's initially where we started our journey and Phoenix is a lot of things but it's known as kind of the suburban abyss. You know track homes forever and for us at the time that we started this it's also known for recreation, the sunbelt, the fiestible, golfing, you know. This is the Phoenix experience but for us at the time that we started this project this is our experience. So this is central Phoenix and I'd say 2000 and well up to 2000 you know there's still parts of it like this and this is this is the downtown at the time it's probably 2010 downtown Phoenix. 60% of Phoenix was vacant lots. Downtown Phoenix stripped and so we had this conversation about what the desert kind of is and what we you know what's kind of projected onto it and part of our conversation was we knew it was more than that. When you go into central Phoenix in 2010 it's a wasteland but you know the Sonoran Desert is really where Phoenix is nestled and that's one of probably the most biodiverse regions in the world and it's a desert. So we knew it wasn't that wasteland that we saw so as artists we wanted to respond to this this conflict and as people who generationally come from these lands we also you know we we knew that it wasn't through our inherited practice so the practice that we learned from our our grandparents our great grandparents all the knowledge that was passed down to us. So to address this conflict between what this space had become and what it was we started a series of planting performances in 2010 and what we did with these is we thought we would return indigenous ecology back to the urban space and so what you see here are a series of you see there's April there with the cactus right you see me with the cactus and these were just kind of these solo efforts against this kind of post-industrial wasteland. Turns out we you know as artists at the time in central phoenix we were exhibiting it showing the films people liked it they would come up to it they'd ask us and they would say they they they wanted to plant they wanted to plant some we thought this was a solo effort but we quickly realized many wanted to be a part of this so the project grew and we also realized that if we realistically wanted to change the landscape especially this degraded urban landscape there was no way that we could do it on our own. So this is another it grew and this is another project a local kind of a community activist organization wanted to start a community garden in central phoenix and 115 degrees in this middle of the summer to to start what we would consider a traditional garden it takes a lot of resources so we we proposed a mass cacti space and they went for it so we created this mass cacti planting performance at a vacant lot in a central phoenix neighborhood and we called it fields to freedom. What was interesting about this this installation was that at the time and obviously it still is urban gardening was very popular however this organization didn't have their resources that other organizations had to fund such a program so considering phoenix you're trying to grow things like kale maybe you need shade especially in extreme heat in the summer you need a sprinkler system you need outside water so we're talking 30 40 50 thousand dollars to create a community garden and for us especially in particularly the location of this space that was located in urban central phoenix and a historic barrio with like 99% latin x indigenous people who are living there we're like we could plant a cactus garden that could feed the entire community for nothing but they didn't work out so what happened is the landowner came over to the site and this community activist group had been working with the person who'd own this vacant lot and this lot had probably been vacant for 50 years the landowner came out saw the saw it walked out and said is this an art installation which is pretty surprising we were like wow he gets it but he said he said there's cactus get get them out of here i don't want cactus on my land i don't want cactus in this community no kidding so you know for us as artists we were like it's all information you know we're like this is interesting like the conflicts beyond what we were considering so we keep moving along and we also realized the limits of like physical space and so at that point we started this project called the mobile eco studio and that that is a that's part of the installation here it's a video that you'll see and this was a mobile space to have these conversations in in central phoenix at the time and the context of central phoenix at the time was this was 2012 2013 there was a thing called sb 1070 i don't know if anybody remembers that over here basically it was a illegal uh unconstitutional anti immigration law that was passed by the state legislator that basically created a situation where there was checkpoints in phoenix checkpoints in latino neighborhoods where basically papers were getting checked no kidding this is this was really happening so we realized our attempts to create like spaces were limited because people couldn't leave their neighborhoods so the mobile eco studio was an attempt to address that and to say well let's take it to them and let's take the conversations about indigenous ecology and and really kind of how do we change this wasteland because most of these neighborhoods that had checkpoints in them were also just those neighborhoods that i showed you where they're pretty much scraped um the the the video is in the installation so i won't play it so you can go over there and spend some time with that and and the other thing that so matt mentioned a wasteland the other thing that we were really problematizing was the idea of the desert as a wasteland and what we were seeing was that actually the desert that we know and we grew up with and the desert that we use and have a relationship wasn't the same desert wasteland that was that wastelands of projection and that was based on other systems right that have decided that you know the desert wasn't valuable and it was more valuable for the lots to be scraped and empty right so um i'm going to show some information here so as we start to move on in our practice we start to do exhibits we end up getting like attention for this stuff and we start doing exhibits outside of arizona and we start sharing this work around the region and around the country and even around the world and as we do that we're starting to dig into what this means to live in the dry lands and i would this map is a map from the paul expedition into this into the west you know the western part of the country much of it was mexican and it was new spain and then it was mexico and the us bought a war against mexico and they got it you know so they sent an expedition to find out what they what what they got and um paul went back to he surveyed the land he went back to washington and he showed him this map and said you have a desert that's what you have you have a place with no water and you can see this boundary says eastern boundary of the arid region and then this one says the western boundary of the arid region and this goes up into the san francisco bay area that's what you see right outside of it and this is basically the regions of the arid regions of the united states as of deemed by by paul the here's another i would like to share is at that time um once that expedition came back with that information they started calling this region the great american desert and if you look really closely here you'll see the plat river right here and denver's right in there of course we're down here a little south but the desert's pretty big um so for for you know for for decade for generations this this whole region was considered the great american desert yeah um i was just going to point out that it's we also like to laugh about how the the ecological regions like stop right at the border interesting here's another map this is a map that is generally used to show precipitation rates in the continental united states there's a mythological and even scientific line called the hundredth meridian the hundredth meridian is a line that scientists have decided is the boundary between more uh what an area of the u.s that has more precipitation in an area that has less and they call this the hundredth meridian it goes right through um as you see eastern kansas right here and you can see um when you talk about the levels of rainfall obviously Nevada sticks out but look at this little section right here south of the arkansas river this is where we're at it's a very arid area it's fun because when we do this work a lot of folks um get offended that um they live in a desert you know that we say that we don't live in a desert it's a prairie they say over in Pueblo and then you know it's fine we'll let you know it's a desert prairie we say um but but it but back to april's point it's a colonial construct the concept of a desert is obviously it's a it's a term that was projected onto the west obviously there was no desert there there was never a wasteland in these regions and that's part of the work what our work speaks to but as we look broader and we start to expand this conversation as we had um as we developed it uh 42 41.2 percent of the land on earth is deserts or drylands 41 percent of earth of land 2.1 billion people live in the world's deserts and drylands 90 percent of the world's population of the of 90 percent of that population is in developing countries um 44 percent of all cultivated land is in drylands these these we start realizing this conversation is bigger than just where we started in central phoenix this is a map of global drylands and this includes like extreme deserts like you would think of the Sahara being uh deserts like phoenix that are very biodiverse and then even high deserts like we have in southern colorado it kind of throws them all in together drylands and deserts drylands is more appropriate term we use that because deserts don't really you know it's not an empty wasteland but we played with that term that's what we call ourselves desert art lab but this is remember that hundredth meridian we were talking about this is research out of um Yale from a couple years ago and just kind of watch this little animation so now you have 1980 2000 see that line it's moving the desert is expanding you know but we at desert art lab the desert is expanding we're excited so and that was part of where we took off you know um the desert again the in its projection is seen as this kind of post apocalyptic space but if you tap into the the the generations and really millennia of of culture and food practice tied to the desert it's an opportunity as dryland expand the knowledge systems tied and linked to these ecologies are more important than ever and um because the desert lands are some of the most degraded they're also some of the most threatened knowledge systems in the world you think about the efforts to protect the forest um the redwoods i mean obviously it was a struggle they cut 90 percent of them down but you know the the efforts to protect the drylands that don't exist they they you know it's seen as a blank canvas to do whatever you want and in that law is being jeopardized and lost especially at a time we need it more than ever so what do we do as artists as artists we we decided um to respond through through our practice and through the legacy of land art earth art and we wanted to create an ecological installation as an edible landscape on degraded arid land degraded okay so um obviously here in the maps you can see we're in colorado um this google map also actually shows um the drylands um here you can see like Pueblo you can see how dry the land is around Lake Pueblo so yeah the left you see Pueblo this is a close-up yeah in the process of these like this you know i'm for artists to do this kind of thing how are you going to do that right how am i going to when we're thinking through this as artists you think well i want to create you know a degraded i want to create an installation on degraded land how am i going to do that well i need land right you know you need land you need resources so we propose this project to creative capital foundation and what do you know they funded it so um this this was the beginning of this kind of like ambitious dream and as you might recall we had some issues in our prior eco installations with the landowners not wanting cactus so that experience actually um you know really informed our practice and through that we realized that in order to do the project that we really wanted to realize we needed to own the land ourselves and so the funding from the creative capital yeah helped us this is um this was a project that was clearly longer and took more time than even a non-profit or anybody who wants to help you could really be in it for you know um so this is the you know so we we we searched and we searched Pueblo Colorado that's where i'm from and as the as the conversation expanded as we learned more about the expansion of the desert we found that to be a perfect place and we searched and searched and searched for a degraded piece of land wasn't very hard let me tell you it's pretty easy um but we found the perfect spot and actually this is it right here you see this spot it's a road so the site that we took was was was used as a road you can't get more degraded than that and um this was our this was our site this is the desert art lab filled site and we this was we established this in 2016 and to kick it off we had you know to initiate the process we had our first planting of Troia at the site with a blessing of community indigenous leaders and elders we actually had a fellowship tied to it for the first summer so we had a handful of students university arts art students work with us for the entire summer to establish the site and what we really wanted to do is document what it was um I don't know if I have slides in here but we spent half the summer not planting but actually document um every little artifact that you could pick up we we did we picked it up we marked it and we cataloged it we still have them in fact they get exhibited yeah I mean it's literally a collection of trash and weeds but um yes a lot of car parts actually tons of car parts um and then we established the first split wave of planting and you know this is um this was uh as you can see the Troia are in the earth um to get one of the challenges we had at the site to establish it was the earth because it was a road it was compact to the point where it was like rock so yeah with the pickaxe you could get into it but at the rate we were going to there's 150 Troia that the rate we were going it was going to take us years to plant those not a summer so um the I went to the local like tractor rental place and I got a uh like an auger is what they call them they're giant tractors that have a a drill on them and you're supposed to be able to just drill into anything uh this land broke broke the auger two of them and so then finally I you know I was really kind of disappointed and frustrated in the the uh rental the tractor place what they they didn't charge me because it didn't work if they were really great but the guy was like have you tried a jackhammer and I was like you know I didn't think of that that's what I use that's what we had to use we had to use a jackhammer to get into the earth that's how hard it was and to to be able to get into this this this this damaged earth um that's what it took we didn't bring soil in we just you know we trusted the teachings and I'll get back to that and so 150 cholla where did we get the cholla we got it from all over the community we spent a whole summer finding cholla's that folks had been taking care of them and we'd asked if we could take a you know a sample of it for the site and we obviously offered services to trim their cholla so many people said yes um this is the site from google earth after it was completed it took about four years for this to actually come up on google earth and it still doesn't really come up very often you have to be um yeah it's hard to find this was the first phase of this this this project that we were just we've been discussing it's a little delayed here so uh 2016 um was the initial site we had to bring native stone in because the earth is so hard it's like a slide water just runs right off of it I mean it's it's like pavement so the stone kept the water in and just to add to that we only we don't use any outside irrigation no outside irrigation only the natural occurring precipitation is what you know feeds and nourishes these plants this is uh July 2021 so the idea is I mean you know this is the first phase and I'll show you a second phase but the idea is these these cholla through through a relationship we just don't leave them we take care of them and um in that process a lot of um crafting does go on and a cholla of this kind can get up to 10 feet tall so you know eventually these will be 10 feet tall and and when you walk in when you walk into the space now you feel it but when you walk into it and it's 10 feet tall you will be immersed in a space that almost is being stripped um one two weeks a year they blossom in June only two weeks they have beautiful radiant magenta flowers that are just you know they're like neon and only two weeks a year so it's very special time um but the thing is is we couldn't plant anything else when we started because the earth was was rock the cholla know how to till they can till through that rock and when they do they're returning organic material believe it or not they're soil now underneath all those rocks there's actually soil and that's because the cholla now the cholla have done the hard work we are going to start the first phase of restoring native short desert short grass which is critical to the project because once you establish the native short grass you you keep the weeds out so right now the weeds are the biggest challenge we have and um they won't go away until there's there's something to keep them out and that's what the native short grass will do and that that'll happen in the spring um and spring will be able to do that and um when he says weeds he means specifically invasive yeah we love weeds i'll tell you yeah we work with other weeds that are native but these are non-native yeah these are invasive non-native they decorate they deplete the soil so that that's the issue with them and they don't allow anything else to grow that's that's what we consider a weed however when i was first establishing the site and i called the city the public to find out what i needed they were like what are you doing we're like we're growing stuff and right away they said you know you can't just grow marijuana wherever you want you can't do that i was like no no no we're not doing we're growing cactus they're like they just are like do what you need to do after that don't bother us you're like don't bother us um but why do we choose the cactus there's a there's a reason it's all art it's metaphor it's crafting and the the cactus is an ecological super plant and it's it's not just you know kind of in its natural form special it's also tied to mythology of the of the americas so um this is a map of the ancients well it's not that ancient but the city of tenochitlán which is the which is the Aztec capital uh tenochitlán is named after the prickly pear the cactus and and the the cactus through the mythology of the americas comes up time and time again it is a plant that is tied to this land and is tied to the stories of this land and that was important to us when we think about philosophy when we think about mythology oftentimes we don't think about the americas and and we don't think about our region especially in the southwest and the deserts these plants are tied to that and and that was one of the reasons why we really wanted to stick to stay with it and to to honor it and and you know they they really they give so they give so much and takes a little it's it's really a lesson and for anyone who doesn't know tenochitlán is Mexico Mexico City yeah it's currently Mexico City and um actually the the cactus are um when you look at um the history of the cactus um everything that we know about these types of cactus they're all from the america so these are and from south the furthest south you can go all the way to the furthest they're in different regions there obviously we have them in Colorado various types of opuntias so like the prickly pear cactus that grow and that are native to various regions so there is a there's diversity in in these plants and just to speak about that when we talk about living things on earth these these plants right here can endure 115 degrees and minus 30 with no water i mean they are as resilient as living things come on on on this earth and and so they are they're incredible they're hated they're hated and and this speaks to that deeper conversation about indigenous ecology and indigenous knowledge that's an indigenous culture you know and if you hate the plant you know and you hate the the resilience um you know there's a bigger conversation going on about but also you can eat this stuff and so this was the this is the this is the important part it's food you know when we talk about sustainability in the drylands technology always gets brought up you know like there's some new tech startup everywhere and actually that's how we started we were acting like a new startup and what we realized through our practice is that there's so much we've left behind and left out it's food and when we think about what we're going to eat with less water because it's coming it's here it's here every day you read more stories about this this right here this is this is this is part of the solution and it has been for 4 000 years you know it's not new it's been left out it's been erased or stigmatized yeah um so here are a couple of other projects that kind of engage these concepts of uh rethinking our our food systems and our food culture and really trying to imagine what it would what it would taste like what it would smell like what it would look like if we uh ate a desert you know created a desert centric diet so a diet based on the limitations of our place of our experience of our time and so these are some of these are some examples of uh some of the food projects that we've done this here the plant that you see growing is considered a weed it's lamb's quarter in English for those of you who might recognize it um it grows prolifically in in Pueblo and other semi-arid arid regions um it's known as a galita as well in Nahuatl and in Mexican Spanish and uh here we have like our take of a kale chip it's a galita chip um it's a desert green and that doesn't take any irrigation so and it's ancient it's been eaten for the 4 000 years in this land these plants will grow 10 feet tall with no outside irrigation it's pretty amazing and then here we have um which is like a sorbet like uh dessert that we made out of the prickly pear cactus with lime and chili and then we're going to share some work that we developed through the 2021 Melon Foundation Fellow at Colorado College and that's part of the exhibit that Cecily had mentioned that's at the Fine Art Center in Colorado Springs um the other the other thing I would like to just mention go back a bit we grow all of it so the calitas we grow the amaranth we grow the cactus we grow it took us six years to get to the point where we can work with the plants because we had to grow them first so it's very slow if there's anything I could say about the practice it's extremely slow practice and considering that um the the high deserts actually have a winter um the plants here grow much slower than other places like Enix or the Sonoran Desert where it's warm most of the year um so for us it's a real lesson um in uh just you know allowing things to uh to be what they are and to kind of trust that that process and so it's a slow growth you know when we talk about this this project um and we think about um it's it's life um we're thinking you know we're looking at 30 50 yeah generations really 100 years so um through this fellowship we were able to um get resources to put into some of the projects we had started and one of them was the mobile eco studio this this was always the intention of the mobile eco studio um to to make it into something that we really wanted to make it into it's a vendor bike so through that process we were able to get resources to to basically you know just strip it it's I don't know if anybody knows what candy's paint is yeah it's it's if you see a low rider they have candy's paint metal flake that's that's that's also what's in it statements um I'll show more pictures but this work will be at an exhibit called Chicana Chicana X landscapes that's open until February at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and I honestly if you've been to anything in southern Colorado this is the place to check out this institution is pretty incredible they're they're they do really incredible stuff this is more images of the bike the mobile eco studio that you that is in the video this is an exhibition in Arizona currently and then it's going to come to Colorado and then once it's out of exhibition it'll be free we can use it but also part of that we started exploring kind of the history of biological or botanical study and if you get into the history of botanical study you'll come across an art a thinker and an artist named Anne Atkins who spent her life studying native algae from England and what she she did to study them is use cyanotype and so we started getting into cyanotype because of this and that's that's a piece that you see in here in this exhibit now the process for us to get to a print like that was probably three years um with cyanotype we you start real small you start real small because you want to learn how to control the process eventually we through the fellowship we wanted to go really big and this is an example of how those cyanotypes are made so they're solar prints they get exposed to the sun all the plants we grow and that's also an important thing for us to create and one of the one of the concepts we were exploring through this process is informed by an indigenous Chicano scholar by the name of Enrique Salmon his work really thinks about this idea of a concentric ecologies and so like in short the idea is that we our ecological systems are our extended kin and so that's kind of how we view our plants our sites everything that we do we see them as like extended family and so what we were so the concept we're exploring here is creating visuals that kind of speak to that idea of the of human and ecological kinship through these kind of solar images and these these prints and again to even get to the point where we could do these our growths our our sites of growth had to be years and four or five years to have the amount of material we needed to do this and this is an example of that piece and yeah so here you see like these plants as part of an extension of us of the of human born and then another piece I'm going to show is Awa Tieta and this one is a piece that we did to launch the second plant phase of planting at the field site we did this last summer 2021 and basically part of the site is to have that conversation visually to see the plants grow right to see them change I mean it's a time-based project the time's long you know but it is and that's part of it but part of it is to create a community space that is open to have conversations about this because there just aren't there there aren't very many there are there are like there's not there's very few especially in where we're at in southern Colorado and so this this community performance project was an attempt to create a you know return a performance and community ritual around planting replanting indigenous ecology I'll share it with you now I won't play at all but and the context of this is that our site the installation is right it's on a mesa right above the Arkansas River so what you have there is land dancers and water dancers and the water dancers are collecting water from the Arkansas River and they will actually walk up the mesa which is right below where we're at and they will unite with the land dancers and establish the first watering which is the only watering we do for our plants and each one getting one watering and it's that first one and we we did it as a community performance but it's also important to recognize is uh water rights in Colorado you know if the water that rains on your roof is in yours right we got we get we get two little containers you can you have to fight for two containers water collection containers right that took that took a long time that was a couple years ago but after those two you don't own that anymore you barely own that so that's also what this is a conversation about that water is um sacred um this is also a way for us to reconnect our uh rich you know our our ceremonial practices with our um our other practices oftentimes we think of we for a lot of communities we have our dances and then there's agricultural practices and most of the dances that um we've learned and that have been passed down are actually mostly dances that are related to agricultural practices agricultural cycles their ceremonies to honor our systems these systems celestial movements our our seasons our existence and for us this was an opportunity to reconnect our our dancing practices with our agricultural practices and they've just as I said they've been disconnected for so long but really we're connected a long time ago and that was also the spirit of the project we we really intentionally found an urban plot because we wanted to bring that that conversation into the middle of of the urban space and that's it's in the middle of Pueblo our site is in the middle of Pueblo um you don't you know rather than have this idea of going out into nature it's it's right in the center of town right in the middle of of uh you know of of Pueblo and and uh that was important to the concept well and we're just going to share a couple of upcoming um projects projects yeah so we have um and we have an installation piece that the Dom Museum in Vienna Austria that opens next week um it's an exhibit called the meal and um that it's it includes living plants so we're quite excited about that um I think there's a image of the installation in progress but it is a salad for a hotter drier future with a recipe and some menus and English and German um and then we always we will we like to end with the words of the elders um the way with Latoli which are basically ancient proverbs of the Americas these are these are are the words of the elders and so I would like to take a moment just to read them to you uh act take care of the things of the earth do something work the land plant no ball plant my gay with that you will have something to eat to drink to wear with that you will stand be true with that you will walk with that they will speak of you praise you with that you will be no thank you thank you we're happy to take any questions are you so you talk about things like yeah so um we have so when we started um our sites in in Southern Colorado and Pueblo um we had a couple actually believe or not we we wasn't just one we got we have several and that's the one we really focused on because it's public um but there's other sites one was our studio now it's our house because we live in it but yeah the amaranth grows the calitas grow the chimisa grows so the things you see in the print those are all um those are all on another site growing and and some of them are perennials and they're six years in seven years in some are annuals like the amaranth and they come back every year but the amaranth is the kind of amaranth we use would be considered a weed by most but the same with the calitas so um yeah we have we have different types of grow sites so I mean so we have amaranth right you would say this but I mean are you doing like yes yes yeah so and we are actually so um coming from we lived in Phoenix for quite some time and in Arizona and particularly the Sonoran Desert there are lots of amazing organizations that collect and preserve natives like seeds wildflowers grasses all sorts of plants that are native to the Sonoran Desert and that was a tremendous resource however here in southern Colorado those don't exist in the same way as you might find in other locations like New Mexico and so at the moment we are collecting seeds to create our own mix of plants that are are specifically you know like specific to the region and then with with the cholla it's a perennial so the harvesting is much different and you actually like to think about growing a peach tree or an apple tree you have to grow the tree first right before you really get the fruit so it's actually taking we're at the point now where we can start to to harvest the the cholla buds and in the next year so but it's taken six years so so the when you get to perennial it's not the year the year it's more it's longer much longer I mean you think about pinioness I think what is it seven years yeah it's like a seven-year cycle so I mean this is kind of the conversation it's it's not the annual that we're all familiar with with a lot of these plants and this is kind of this is our our reference to those indigenous knowledge systems that are so vital these days you know if you were to collect say for example pinioness every year you would have none for like the future and so these um these cycles are really important for us to re-engage and to remember it was another hand yes so I was curious did you ever have a previous experience growing plants before you were demonstrating other than you know the first one that you talked about this one? well you know um we started a grow project probably almost 20 years ago yeah and it was it was an effort just that was on our own in Phoenix to like convert our grass into an indigent into arid landscape so that was our first take on it it's still there it's amazing we don't own the house anymore though so that was our first start at it but you know when you get into it you know one of the things that was the kind of catalyst for this is that when you get into your family story is you learn that your your grandparents ate cactus and and what does that mean they grew cactus because you're not in a lot of cases you're not getting that at the grocery store especially you know 60 70 years ago so we yeah we come from a history of of growth absolutely and we wouldn't we wouldn't be here otherwise you know we wouldn't exist if it wasn't for that and so you know we were trying to do this project in an art way return to that and the way we could you know so we had to start we had to start and yeah that that was you know that at this point that was 20 years ago so yeah you know um we don't and there's a couple of reasons why we don't um when we started one of the projects was this certification cookbook and that was part of our creative capital funding and and you know when you're an artist you learn from your practice you know I mean you should right you go in and you think you're going to do one thing and then you learn your practice and you're like okay this is this is I'm learning more and one of the things we really considered was and we do have yes we do but one of the things that we considered is that these are these are fluid these are these are not by yourself these aren't just things you're going to read and then reproduce these are the space that the physical space is is the cookbook that site is and and to really learn it you have to you have to you have to be on the site and so that's the cookbook for us is those community events we do it's bringing people in it's not so simple as I followed all the steps I'm there you know it's it's a it's a practice and so we kind of shied away from creating permanent recipes although that installation in Vienna has recipes in it um yeah and and actually the other thing is that it's not I think sometimes for us like Matt said we're we're also learning as we are throughout our practice and for us it's also um there's like a disconnect sometimes from the idea of a cookbook or just recipes right and for us it's really important to think about how this all happens like how how do these foods grow how to cultivate them how to harvest them how to prepare them how to plant them how to plant them um and so for us that that's part of the recipes um strategies for um maintaining these ecological systems for maintaining relationships with these ecological systems for creating community around these ecological systems for um so it it's uh and and one thing that we get asked when we do things is people say well can those go to market yeah you know we get asked that all the time not for us you know for us it's about cultural practice and and there is there are examples of food ways going to market that didn't end so well uh quinoa is is one you know quinoa is an ancient indigenous food practice out of south based in South America and it got real popular and real healthy in the western world and it got so expensive and did the indigenous communities couldn't even afford it anymore so there there's you know we don't participate in that part of it it's it's about cultural practice it's about art really as a site of cultural practice yeah so it's um it's just it's called a cyanotype and it's basically like a salt-based um chemical chemical mix um they're not you know they're they're there is when it comes to photography there's as non-toxic as you can imagine some of them are in food um and basically you know it's it's a it's an early form of of photography you know very early and it was used not in the way that we think of photography it was used almost like a copy machine so blueprint yeah blueprint so so it's really seen as a it's like that it was an early copy machine and but like an adkins used it to document native flora and it was really well done and you know it's a when you when you go small it's pretty great it's pretty fun but to go large is really difficult because um you know it's it is like it's UV sensitive so when you are making a six-foot print you know you have to you know you have to have space you have you know it doesn't have to be dark but you have to have dark space and if you don't you have to do tonight you know so you can only you know you got to mix this you got to mix the chemical solution and then you know you have to wait till you have time to to paint it but you basically paint it on you paint on as an emulsion and then what we do is we put it in you know we put it in basically black trash bags so we have to wrap it in trash bags so we can store it and then when we have time we make the prints we do it all outside though so what what's cool about the cyanotype it's not very sensitive so you can roll it out and it's not like photopaper where if you if you expose that within seconds it's done right cyanotype takes more like minutes you can roll it out you still got to go fast but you can roll it out you can put all your plants on it you got to have everything really organized no doubt but you get to roll it out and then you know what's fun about the the process is really any anything can go on it and but what we were inspired by was that that process of kind of sharing form and and uh yes it has been yeah so yeah it's history i i think it's it's real like um as an as an art form it's it's kind of um it really um she really kind of did its its strength was in botanical documentation and then if you google and add can you'll see it right away it's incredible subject ecologists what was the name of the his name's andrike salmon and he's based out of uh you east us yeah california state university east bay yeah yeah he's he's great he's really great yeah oh it's okay um i'd love to hear more about the what they oh the fellows our fellows oh so um they we took we kind of looked at it as like a field school so we had readings you know we talked we you know not too many not too many but um you know there was readings there was uh like um hiking trips where we because this is out of context you got to remember where our sites at it's in the middle of an urban space so it is in a way out of context so we'd go into context right so we'd go on these hikes into these spaces where you could see this space and there's not too many undisturbed but there are some in in southern colorado and in actually in public county there are some where you know there's thousand-year-old junipers still to this day right now and and so you know we we did a study um we did community outreach where like uh you know so the process of kind of engaging the community to um develop our our our you know those those plants all came from the community so that they helped us with that um honestly to be honest with you at some point the labor became beyond what a fellow could do I'm not kidding like it it was you got to the point where it was very hard labor so at that point we we didn't expect they didn't do any of that actually we had paid help we had labor we we actually had you know we had paid staff at that point to do it so they they were working the jackhammers or anything um and we did actually provide each of them with uh with a scholarship or a stipend so we paid each of them and um actually one of the I think nice surprises that came out of that is one of our fellows went to graduate school and it's now a university professor art professor yeah in the midwest in Iowa the other is a grad student at CSUP at Colorado State University Pueblo and she was in the performance that so six years later the second wave of performance she was in it she was one of the people carrying the vessels so um you know they're still with us um they still they want to come back all the time like hey I want to come back and work at the site you know and so they're they're part of the um they're still they yeah they're still a part of the project and there was three there was three one was from Kansas State University one was from CSUP Colorado State University Pueblo actually it was Fort Collins yeah it was for it was Colorado State University Fort Collins and then one was from public community college yeah the one that was at Fort Collins is now an grad program in CSU Pueblo so that's why she's still around and we get to she still wants to you know help out I'm just curious about your neighbors in Buffalo that's a good one the land owner owner and it's been nice and surprising to hear that so we've gotten to the practice yeah so I'm curious about your neighbors in Pueblo and how you worked with them and what their reaction has been yeah I'll tell one story and then I'll let Matt tell another yeah they've been great honestly they've been all in they've been so enthusiastic they've been like awesome I will say at first though when we told them what we were doing they all kind of giggled thinking like oh how cute even trying to grow a star here yeah nothing's gonna grow nothing can grow there that land's dead that was and so now that things are growing they're like astonished I mean they're all the most of them in the same neighbors they think it's magic and it's not it's desert ecology it's sticking to what works it's working with the land not against it um but you know what's happening here Denver is expensive people from Denver move to Colorado Springs Colorado Springs is expensive people from Colorado Springs move to Pueblo now we have not seen this movement of people to Pueblo probably since the steel mill opened you're talking a hundred years right and so but it's happening now people from outside of Pueblo from northern Colorado are moving into Pueblo and one of the families that live behind us was an old Pueblo family and you got you got to understand Pueblo is an old Chicano community when I say old many of the community people many of the community they've lived in that region for for a time before it was the US old and they've been there in the same houses no kidding same neighborhoods it's it's awesome for like six seven eight generations very common and that's what our neighbors are well one of the neighbors behind us who was very helpful they I mean they were they were helping us move rock and stuff they were so into it and always out there while we were sometimes with a bottle of tequila but uh they moved the elderly um their their parents one it was a family their parents are very old that the kids would come and help them the parents were just too old to be living on their own and they they sold the house and it was a limbo for about three four years that was the first year finally this year somebody bought it and and uh and we thought well okay somebody bought that house it's right behind our site we didn't think much of it but within a couple of months of that house being purchased with Desert Art Lab gets an email and it says uh basically I just bought the house behind you I want to buy your land and thought okay that's interesting not responding to that you know and then we get a a letter in the mail and it's like all caps no kidding to our house and it's like I want to buy your land you know like and so it was like oh things are changing um I'm at the site all the time so the you know I how do I know the neighbors because I'm at the site I don't they don't have my cell phone number that some of them don't use cell phones you know they it's it's old school there public is old school like that and uh finally eventually this individual finds me out there and he comes over he's like you know I I'm friendly I'm your neighbor and I said you know within you know a couple we greeted each other but I just told him you know this is not for sale and he was like you got my messages I was like yes I did and you know this isn't for sale and you know we had a conversation about that and he said he wasn't trying to buy up the whole neighborhood you know and but this is the pressures that are going on yeah and this is why we had to own the law this is why we had to own our property because you know you never know what's going to happen and ever since that conversation I have gotten no letters and no emails or anything so I think you know it's pretty clear that this isn't like a site for sale so that's what I told him but he told me that he asked everybody if they were selling their land so I was like oh okay wow you're awesome but we've never seen things like that you you got to understand Pueblo the property values in Pueblo when we started this and we weren't you know it was much different than it is now and these weren't sites that were seen as valuable at all or worth anything or anybody wanted and you know the site we had had we done nothing to it trust me he wouldn't want to buy it because it was a road it was literally a road so you know but believe it or not some of our neighbors did not like that they didn't like it and and they have basically come out and you know in a way and we've never asked and you know there's many plots of land in this area we're at we've never asked the question about that we've never asked our neighbors hey you're selling that you know but after this happened several a neighbor came up to us and said you know basically you want to offer you to acquire these other properties from us because of what's going on and I don't know if we will or not but that to us was like oh they really they feel like they want to make sure this keeps going and that that was cool you know that was a cool situation and these aren't folks we talk too much I mean you know in the last six years you know we see them once a year you know we're not in their business it's important we don't get into their business but if they're always open to come you know we don't try to force this on anybody we don't promote this in the community like you would expect we just you know we do our our thing we keep it going but we're not trying to shove this in everybody's face it's our site to work and it's and it's a site for people to discover we see it as that so we don't put the address out there it's not out there and it's on purpose it's intentional people find it and that's that's important to us I also wanted to add that another reason why it's important for us to own the the space is that actually um these ecological systems as we said they don't exist in the marketplace right so in order to maintain our inherited and traditional food practices how are we going to access the traditional foods that aren't available commercially um so you think oh well I could just go collect them but actually you can't because most of nature is owned by someone either it's private land or it's federal land or the state owns it or the city owns it and so it complicates our relationship with our that our traditional ecological systems and food practices and so that's another kind of just another reason why owning this space and having the ability to engage with it as we want is really important to us and that and that speaks to us as you know identifying as Chicano, Chicana, Chicanax we see that as our entry point into our indigenous past and in the southwest that is um that that's our story that's that's why we're here and so for us that's really important that we engage that story and and this our food practice our ecological practice connects us to that and then that's that's and that's one of the reasons why we identify our organization as that yes I just want to get back to Amaranth oh yeah yeah no we can go on forever about Amaranth Amaranth this is great um like if you're farmer sticking in what is it a you can discuss um the violence Amaranth from that picture yeah so you know Amaranth is a very um it there the word is used to describe a lot of plants so the Amaranth that we are engaging is the one that you wouldn't get seeds for it grows um naturally wild in the west and the part you eat on our Amaranth is the leaf it's not the seed yes yes exactly so um it's a version of Piguille so this is important that's where I was going is that this has become so so one of the first things the Spanish did when they colonized the Americas was ban Amaranth they went right after food practice Amaranth has been attacked for 500 years um the latest version of that attack is through multinational chemical companies that create things like roundup ready seeds Amaranth can grow as a weed and farmers don't like it because it takes more labor to get rid of it so they have seeds that they can grow their plants and then spray chemicals all over the place and it doesn't kill their seed or their plant but it kills the Amaranth well guess what Amaranth is never going anywhere it figured this out and it's now roundup ready resistant yeah and and this is a real issue you know the chemical companies are furious but Amaranth won't stop and so there's campaigns across the midwest to eradicate Amaranth and they changed the name to Piguille so they call it Piguille the ancient Amaranth and there's literally signs in the midwest that say they have pigweed with an X through it red X you know and so and so that but the Amaranth persists and we grow that kind of Amaranth yes we grow the Amaranth that is roundup ready resistant and you think about the story of colonization that's what we're that's what we have now you know it's not the past it's something else you know and the Amaranth is a real inspiration for us well I think it seems like we got to everyone's questions we'll be available if anyone asks any additional questions. Thank you all for coming and it was a pleasure I want to do a shout out to my sister Caroline. We're going to remind you all that we have a lot of Amaranth so many of our historians cultivate what we do in our swath and I don't know where to take it but it's up front on October 13th It's the 13th of October thank you I hope you are an artist speaking so I hope to see you all soon thank you so much for coming and take a look around for me.