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Artists
Each year, *This Is Not A Drill* supports five NYU Faculty Fellows and five to ten NYU Student Fellows who receive stipends to develop their artistic *This Is Not A Drill* investigations and projects. They convene regularly as the *This Is Not A Drill* working group.
The inaugural *This Is Not A Drill* exhibition shows new pieces by Fellows Tega Brain, Mingyue Chen, Pedro Galvao Cesar de Oliveira, Richard Move, Pato Hebert, Karen Holmberg, Irene and Camila Mercadal, Genevieve Pfeiffer, and Yan Shao.
Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne's work, Fragile States, centers the voices, knowledges, and experiences of climate activists who have been imprisoned. Documenting and archiving their experience in a non-extractive way on large hanging canvases, this piece itself steps outside of the museological and becomes an act of activism and works towards establishing a new and more radical climate ontology.
Mingyue Chen, Annie Li, Henry Hao-yu Wang, Leo Ji, RJ Sun, and Marjorie Yang's interactive installation, Rising, follows an equally activist agenda. Putting audience members into the shoes of New York City residents who are faced with rising sea levels, class stratification, and the pressures of personal interests, this interactive piece frames knowing as doing and combines climate data and predictive modeling with interaction and game design.
Taking a cue from Escobar's focus on the flow of life, Pedro G. C. de Oliveira's Just In Case centers a post-dualistic non-Eurocentric approach to the climate emergency. Two emergency cabinets materialize Global South perspectives on climate justice and embody concepts of Desobediencia Tecnológica, Resilience as Futurism, Hybrid Nature and Gambiarra.
Impact, rather than flow, inspires Pato Hebert's Study #17 for the Infeasibility of Peaceful Nuclear Explosions, a very personal exploration of the entanglement of individual and environmental catastrophes. The ceiling-suspended Panamá wood examines the U.S. government's Interoceanic Canal Studies of the 1960s vis-à-vis techno-optimism, colonial and imperial precedents, and the devastating impacts on humans and the ecologies of which we are a part.
In their piece Visualizing....Art-Science of the Future, Karen Holmberg, Andres Burbano, and Pierre Puentes share an acute interest in ecological environmental disaster, risk, and regeneration in past and future contexts. Their large, photogrammetry-based wall panels and interactive visual essay explores evocative data from a prehistoric rock art cave under a recently-erupted volcano in Patagonia. They invite new ways of thinking about time and the geophysicality of our planet, as well as renewal and regeneration.
A different type of landscape is the focal point of the piece Dirt and Water by Irene and Camila Mercadal: Patagonian peatlands, a type of wetland that stores a disproportionate amount of carbon in the soil. The contradicting perspectives of inhabitants, as well as the unique landscape, are captured in interviews, filming, and data analysis, and examine local ecological knowledges.
Richard Move emphasizes more local explorations of movement, ecology and flourishing ecosystems. Their documentation of the dance performances that comprised Herstory of the Universe@Governors Island, the first performance commissioned by the Trust for Governors Island, showcases six sites and choreographies that highlight the island's unique landscapes in the midst of one of the world's most populated urban areas.
The material manifestations of human and plant interactions in New York City are central to Genevieve Pfeiffer's Intimate Garbage. With her interactive installation of dried flowers, plastic discards, and handwritten poems, she asks what parts of plants are valued by people in the city, what is discarded, and what time scales do we invoke when plants and culture brush against each other?
Yan Shao also develops an intimate relationship with plants. Her sound installation Algae Chorus reveals the mutual dependencies between humans and photosynthetic organisms. It enrolls the audience in a collaborative relationship with living algae. The algae use the audience's collective carbon exhalations to grow while sensors transform their movement and photosynthesis process into sounds.