Cara’s Presentation was May 22nd, 2023
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
INGENIUM Creatives is a Creativity: Think Tank and Symposium. We are an annual forum/symposium for open presentations, think tanks, round tables, impromptu break-out sessions, panels, improvisations, workshops, contemporary critical research discussions, and varied theoretical reflections on the Creative Practice.
We celebrate divergent thinkers and seek to provide and promote a space where useful ideas, solutions, and collaborations within a global audience will flourish. We intend to advance the cultural and practical landscape of Creatives in all disciplines of Industry, Science, Communication, and Art and to help tackle the newest frontiers of ingenuity and ethics. We invite our Global communities to come together to participate in a shared dialogue that is inclusive, that is expansive, and that is relevant for our time. We purport to impact the future through our present focus on “possibility thinking” and scrutinizing the origins, nature, cultivation, importance, and preservation of creativity.
These video excerpts below made with Jay Canode and Shahab Zagari play with the absurdity and complexity of our consumption-obsessed, waste-oblivious society–particularly in the midst of greenwashing, environmental racism / green colonialism, and the fallacious “renewable” energies movement. I imagine co-evolution where we listen to the stories objects tell.
Collaborations with video artist Shahab Zargari for the University of Las Vegas, Ingenium Creatives Anti-Conference Conference 2023, Symposium/Think Tank, The Culture of Creativity
Additional videographers: Jay Canode, Clara Pena, Tom DaSilva
These video excerpts below made with Jay Canode and Shahab Zagari play with the absurdity and complexity of our consumption-obsessed, waste-oblivious society–particularly in the midst of greenwashing, environmental racism / green colonialism, and the fallacious “renewable” energies movement. I imagine co-evolution where we listen to the stories objects tell.
Improvising Counterhegemonies: A Lived Manifesto – YouTube
see the Fibershed Community Vest description
Zazu Dreams: Spooky Action at a Distance – YouTube
During my performance-workshop climate manifesto at the 2023 Ingenium Creatives Thinktank Symposium, University of Las Vegas, I lectured and danced in two contradictory costumes. Dancing in front of a diptych of West Virginian children coal miners from the 1800s with Congolese children lithium miners, I am wearing Ellza Coyle’s VHS tape-ribbon hand-knitted, moebius-looped dress–(inspired by the artist’s loom-woven cassette-tape outfits https://studioblackrose.net/recycled-works/).
Cobalt (essential for battery production for “green” products like electric vehicles) is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Like lithium, cobalt’s humanitarian and environmental costs are perpetuated by wanton corruption—spurring ecological extermination, child slavery, and death. Additionally, battery waste, as well as every link in the solar and wind technology supply chain, is dumped throughout Asia, South America, and Africa.
The VHS ribbons are made from mylar that is coated with toxic metals—allowing the tape to carry a magnetic signal, allowing the tape to tell stories. In front of a variety of projected images, I danced those woven stories—exposing their fertile contradictions. Through music and film, this biohazardous VHS-mylar material connects us and expresses some of our most intimate storytelling (multiple stories told through pop-culture movies, cross-cultural and nature documentaries, and self-help videos recorded on VHS tapes).
My presentation created a provocative more expansive story: combining these intimacies with our contemporary calamity of plastic accumulation and disposal—where there is no “away,” particularly for vulnerable, underserved communities. I explored repurposing toxic materials— temporarily keeping them out of landfill, providing momentary reprieve from the devastating impacts of electronic waste and petroleum-plastic’s death cult, while demonstrating the possibility for biosynergistic life choices that refuse these normalcies. I traversed woven layers that investigate the tension between climate chaos and climate resiliency.
Dancing verbal and body-based stories, I wore these technologies—contradictory community weavings. As an attempt to help guide our transition from the Anthropocene to the Ecozoic, I integrate the voice of Thomas Berry.
The second costume is a fibershed multispecies, communally-created wool outfit composed of multiple animal fibers (yak, sheep, llama, goat). For this bioregional collaboration involving over thirty fibershed community members, typewritten (using a 1950s typewriter) locally, hand-made hemp-paper tags hung from each patch of woven fiber indicating the species and breed of animal, the farmer, spinner, weaver, or knitter (including sheep horns as buttons). Involving local labor, local fibers, local dyes, Fibersheds challenge fast fashion, textile tyrannies, and convenience-consumer industries: an embodied technology (techne = to weave, to fabricate) witnessing and acting from our embedded interconnectedness.
The Kabbalah’s Zohar in conjunction with Stephen Hawking is represented in the projected image by Micaela Amateau Amato (my Sephardic mother and primary collaborator) from my cross-cultural climate justice book: Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era. I explored: what happens when socialized norms are so deeply ingrained in us? How does the construction of desire and manufactured consent render our imaginations impotent; our capacity to think, to breathe, dream, and to act in the face of climate chaos so profoundly distorted by normative hierarchies in which we are complicit with ecological devastation? I offered an invitation to challenge our global metacrises—interlocking oppressive systems. My intention was to activate our potential for a climate resilient, cultural paradigm transformation.
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