Prevailing over Prevalence

Keep going when the going seems impossible

Mapping The Blued Trees Symphony GIS, Aviva Rahmani 2022

The conclusions from my work on the new project, Tidal Flushing this week at Swale House on Governors island, thanks to the support of ecoartspace, has painted a grim picture of the scale of prevalence of climate change and the authoritarian-fascist dictatorships driving climate change has imposed on the Earth. I confess to periodic despair. But I seize on vision, which may be a form of hope without sentimentality. This residency has revealed a glimmer of light on vision for me.

You can come see what I have been doing during my residency through June 14. You can see elements of The Blued Trees Symphony from which this new work emerged, at a reception Friday night at the 92nd St. Y in NYC, starting with a 6: PM panel about the book, “Mothers of Invention,” June 12. You can see one of the drawings from this residency as part my participation in a show opening June 25 at the Anita Rogers gallery in Chelsea.

The skeleton of a strategy forward has emerged since I began this residency June 1. The strategy became clear from reflecting on the systems at work. Since HONNEGEER in Inner Mongolian has invited me to expand The Blued Trees Symphony, the new score has been emerging in my mind. The premise behind the score has always been that one great course to salvation was to implement contiguous habitat restoration. The challenges are immense in the face of what we have wrought: inconsistent weather, species loss, redien, continued extractions and periodic flooding. That said, there are opportunities for reestablishing that critical contiguity and water runs through those opportunities. Eleven years after initiating The Blued Trees Symphony as the cornerstone of Blued Trees, I have a more complex vision of what needs to be woven into the score at a global scale: not just the horizontal mosaic of musical measures, but the sonorous verticality of water and soil. It may become another iteration of the opera and will take time to realize.

In the map image for this post, I had indicated when I created the GIS in 2022, that a site near Ulaanbaatar was already part of the project, based on what I saw and had inspired me during my visit to the grasslands in 2017. That was cheating a bit. At the time it was truly only a vision of possibility and inspiration to expand The Blued Trees Project into China and engage with the music of Inner Mongolia. Now, as Tidal Flushing is fleshed out, I can see how to integrate this invitation into a larger vision of possibility, I can flesh out the rest of the score, including the bathymetry between continents. It may be a narrow path forwards but I believe it is a real path.

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