Crossing Traditions

Embodying Ecology Through Experiential Art

Embodied Ecological HeritageThe Ad Hoc Team

It was a rhythm that had begun to feel like part of me. My body moved without conscious direction, plucking out a soft ball of masa and flattening it on the low, wooden table. The soft repetitive thuds of my fingers against the cool corn, finely ground and moist, created a sound, comforting in its familiarity. As I made each round tortilla, one hand reaching for another ball as the other passed the completed circle toward the firehearth, I watched a young girl deftly twist dried corn kernels from the cob, catching them in her hand and tossing them at her feet for the waiting chickens. Eating corn, the chickens would grow strong and healthy, and then provide ideal nourishment. I drifted through this familiar scene until the pain in my back brought my awareness back to my body, breaking the rhythm of the moment. Fortunately, work here is shared, help was quickly offered and, without a word, my place was taken and the rhythm continued.

Making tortillas, and much of the work in this subsistence farming community, is critical to daily life, reflecting an intimate connection between a healthy body and the natural environment it interacts with and learns from. Traditional activities, or those that people trace back to what “Maya people do,” are critical not simply because they are valued in the community or because they provide a healthy, local source of food. They are critical because practicing them actually changes individual bodies through phenomenological experience. Heightened sensory experience changes us, both mentally and physically. Experiencing traditional activities, through everyday ritual, can make us well.

“Embodied ecological heritage” was conceived in response to the lack of ways to adequately conceptualize the links between a healthy body (and mind) and traditional ecological knowledge and practice. It takes into account gaps in existing discussions and conceptualizations surrounding the health/TEK link, extending beyond ethnobotanical intersections toward a richer understanding of how bodies change through ecological interactions.

Kristina Baines

We invite you to fill out the form below, as an academic and/or artist, should you be inspired to participate and collaborate in our ever-growing traveling and virtual exhibitions!

The “Organizers”

Kristina Baines

Kristina Baines received her PhD in Applied Anthropology at the University of South Florida. She has an MSc in Medical Anthropology from the University Oxford and an MA in Social Anthropology from Florida Atlantic University. She is usually found considering how being on a particular patch of Earth affects wellness, and attempting to translate all the convoluted data so that humans can understand and, perhaps, even enjoy it. In some circles, she is known as the “Corn Lady”.

Victoria Costa

Victoria Costa (co)founded by1982.com, a web and print promotion company, a couple years ago so that she could enable creative folks to disseminate, and monetize, their grand ideas. She is stoked to enable so many brilliant people to re/consider how ideas are translated and shared with the world and to gather so many incredible, like-minded bodies, with their vast spectrum of talents and interests, in the same space.

The “Artists”

Daniel Velazquez

is multi-media artist based in Belize, working on wildlife conservation/cultural documentaries. He first arrived in Belize in 1994 with the US Peace Corps and has worked all through the Americas in community development and disaster relief. For the past ten years, Daniel has been painting, shooting and producing films in Belize, where he now calls home.

His video installation “Maya Corn Cry” focuses on Belizean resistance of economic imperialism through GMO seed burning and highlights Maya communities and their traditions, which have transcended centuries of onslaught of international homogeneity.

Deanna Charles

Deanna Charles of Oakland, CA wants to identify and understand the hardships that life continues to surprise her with- to learn to confront them with an open mind and lessen the psychological weight that they may carry.

She has become aware of the patterns in life and of the way they have presented themselves. Only through photography can she put order to the rhythms in her life. Her perspective is that of scientific documentation abstracted to create an intimacy with the viewer. In her photographs, the subjects take on an aesthetic connection through their patterns, geometry and snapshot color palette. She presents the significance they have to a specific moment, and chooses to present them as a delicate and beautiful arrangement of elements.

Vaimoana Niumeitolu

Born Vaimoana Litia Makakaufaki Niumeitolu, Moana is a Poet, Painter, and Actor. She was born in Nuku’alofa, Tonga; raised in Hawa’ii and Utah; and now lives, creates and loves in NYC. She is a founding member of Mahina Movement, the phenomenal all woman trio who have performed on over 400 stages including having performed with Angela Davis, Amiri and Amina Baraka, Tony Kushner, Noam Chomsky, Sonia Sanchez, Kool Herc, Suheir Hammad, Sarah Jones, Medusa, Dead Prez and countless others. Moana is the author of a poetry, performance text, and visual art chapbook, tonga provo harlem. Moana has traveled and shared her poetry & painting all over the US and in Fiji, Tonga, Ireland, Italy, and South Africa. She has been seen acting at the Metropolitan Opera and sharing her one woman show, Tongue-in Paint, which had it’s world premiere at solo NOVA’s 5th Annual Arts Festival at Performance Space 122 in NYC. Her other production, A Prayer for Tonga, premiered at Harvard University. She graduated from New York University in painting and performance, earned the Ellen Stoekel Fellowship/fulll scholarship in painting & drawing from Yale University and attended Columbia University’s Graduate Program in Acting.

Moana gives much eternal appreciation to her parents, her familia, friends and her comunidad all over the world for supporting her, encouraging her, and listening for the gold. She loves to eat with her hands, go barefoot absolutely anywhere in the world, her harmonica named Smoothie and Boxing & Beatboxing, both with a capital “B.” She loves that she is growing older. Life has just begun.

Kazilla

Kazilla style bounds between the street arts and fine arts. A native to New Mexico, she currently resides & works from her studio/gallery in Little Haiti, MIAMI. After moving to the east coast her work transcended the street arts and combined her two styles of fine art and graffiti to create an edgy, colorful clash of two very different worlds. The feminine figures, surreal landscapes and vibrant colors create a daunting visual feast for all audiences. She also works as a live artist (performing for celebrity performers like Wu Tang, Slick Rick, Chaka Khan, Digable Planets, Steel Pulse, Timbaland, Immortal Technique, Arrested Developement), designer, muralist, photographer, producer, lyricist, editor, musician, is creative director producer of threesixty365, and is the director of the non-profit artist group Multiversal.

Cultures of Wonder

The Cultures of Wonder project out of San Francisco, CA is a collaborative endeavor involving many artists and a wide variety of media that sets out to make comprehensive studies of cultures that never existed. We have been exploring the first of these cultures, the Thulans, for over three years and what you see here is the presentation of these findings.

With this exhibit we explore the concept of embodied ecological heritage by inviting our viewers to explore how a people would develop both culturally and physically in reaction to an environment that exists only in our imagination. The concept of embodied ecological heritage was developed to explore gaps in the way we approach cultures in this world. It is in gaps such as this that the Cultures of Wonder project thrives. This is where the Thulans live. We hope that by presenting the ways in which the Thulans interacted with their environment, we will bring some awareness to the nearly limitless ways others shape and are shaped by both the real world and the countless imaginary worlds that exist inside us all.

The Cultures of Wonder Project is: Francesca Borgatta, Kirstin Cummings, Ren Dodge, Kirsten Goldberg, Damian Lanahan-Kalish, Danielle Schlunegger and Andrew Werby.

Gina Margillo

The GREENPUBES installation by Gina Margillo imagines a world where the environmental and political are weighted as heavily as the personal; a world where nothing goes to waste, where all people are working for the greater good, and where every problem has a creative solution. Here, the severity of environmental destruction is counterbalanced with the current trend/ preoccupation with body hair removal. Inspired by the excess glamour in my current city, Miami, after 20 years of residency in San Francisco, I ponder the question: What if we harnessed the energy that goes into our own vanity and used it for the common good?

The GREENPUBES installation represents embodied ecological heritage by highlighting the legacy of environmental destruction that will be inherited by future generations unless we utilize cleaner energy sources, and human responsibility. Often the relationship between body and the environment that nourishes us is taken for granted. The installation imagines that people, preoccupied with personal issues (in this case vanity) become actively engaged in an environmental solution.

The “Community Members”

Featured in this video are members of the community of Santa Cruz in the Toledo district, Belize. Hoping to convey what inspired the development of the embodied ecological heritage framework, we asked them to describe their practices important to their lives and well-being. We hope that the connections they make will enhance the discussions provided by the academics, leading to a more holistic understanding of how embodied ecological heritage might be used in a wide variety of contexts.

Big thanks to:

Bascilio Teul, Vice-Alcalde

Florentina Pop

Elutero Mes

Martha Pop

Ezekiel Canti

The “Academics”

We gathered the pieces for this video installation from anthropologists in various stages of their careers working in applied and academic settings around the world. Hoping to share a wide range of insights, we gave them a simple request: to define the terms “embodied” and/or “ecological” and/or “heritage” as they related to their own work, and to each other. Asking them to self-record a conversational-style monologue, we hoped to convey the fluidity of the terms and concepts they represent, while capturing their personal connections and applications of our installation’s theme, “embodied ecological heritage.”

Thanks so much to:

Rebecca K. Zarger – University of South Florida

Chas Salmen – Univeristy of California – San Francisco – School of Medicine

Paige West – Tow Associate Professor – Barnard College and Columbia University

douglas carl reeser is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida, and is a contributing editor at Recycled Minds and Anthropology News. He is currently working on his dissertation based on research in southern Belize, examining the intersection of State-provided health care with a number of ethnic-based traditional medicines. He also loves food.

Kate Fayers-Kerr – University of Oxford

Kerry Hawk Lessard – Native American Lifelines

Amy McLennan is a DPhil student in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her attention is currently focused on the political, social and economic change that has coincided with obesity emergence in a small Pacific island nation. In her DPhil thesis she is specifically interested in the trope of ‘living for today’: what it means in daily practice, where it has come from, and how it is linked to the way in which we relate to food, money, material goods, and to each other. In her work she predominantly draws on biocultural and critical medical anthropological theory, although she also makes use of material from history, economics, epidemiology, sociology, public health and human geography.

Mabel Sabogal – University of South Florida

Hannah Graff – National Heart Forum (UK)

Elizabeth Murray – University of South Florida

We invite you to click below, as an artist and/or academic, to offer your own contribution to our ever-growing traveling and virtual exhibitions!

ACADEMICS!! Click here to learn more and/or to send us a message!

How does embodied ecological heritage apply to your work? In your study community, how are ecological heritage activities embodied? How does the community express its connection to the land or natural environment in general? How could the framework of embodied ecological heritage be helpful in understanding the critical nature of traditional practices? Or heritage practices? Is heritage connected to wellness?

We are asking that you use these questions as a guideline to record a short recorded piece in which you define each of the following three terms: “embodiment” “ecology” and/or “heritage”. Pieces may be narrative-driven or a more theoretical discussion or a combination of these. They should be between 1 and 5 minutes in length and follow a very simple “speaking straight to the webcam” format. They will continue to be edited for use in future events, and online publications.

Please state your intentions to participate with a very brief (a sentence or two) description of how one (or all) of these themes (embodiment, ecology, heritage) plays out in your work.

ARTISTS!! Click here to learn more and/or to send us a message!

How would you capture the embodiment of ecological heritage in your work? How can you convey the importance of traditional ecological knowledge and practice to wellness in a Maya subsistence farming community in Belize to a varied audience? How should this sensory experience play out?

We are asking you to use these thoughts and photographs to inspire an original piece that embodies ecological heritage and health and is relevant to this particular community of study. We are looking for highly creative and thoughtful pieces.

Please email a short description of your preliminary ideas so we can discuss how to integrate the piece into future exhibits. Please communicate with us directly about the deadline to get your work in our hands! We can facilitate the printing of your piece on canvas or some other large-format premium stock, or have the capabilities to assist in other areas of production.

Click here to see photos of our Innovent at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in San Francisco, 15 November 2012!

Thanks to the AAA for providing a space, an audience and the inspiration for our first presentation of “embodied ecological heritage” through a collaborative, multi-media, experiential exhibition.

AAA Abstract- Thursday November 15th 10:15am- 12:00pm
CROSSING TRADITIONS: EMBODYING ECOLOGY THROUGH EXPERIENTIAL ART

This event explains the new framework of “embodied ecological heritage” through participation in a multi-sensory experience at the border between contemporary art and anthropological practice. Participants are guided through “traditional” prescriptive activities, which they must complete to enjoy a more “traditional” gallery experience. These contrasting traditions are explored through this embodied experience. Participant observation is an essential and traditional anthropological methodology, yet it is seldom used for the dissemination of the findings from the participation. This event seeks to address this disjunction through inviting participants to embody the research knowledge before they learn of it in a more traditional art gallery style event, with an aim to bring a holistic understanding to the images and ideas brought back from the field. The event and the framework that informs it, embodied ecological heritage, are based on research in a Maya subsistence farming community in southern Belize. Traditional activities, with roots in the natural environment, are linked with ideas of wellness in a broad sense. Heritage practice becomes essential to health in the context of direct interaction with the environment. This event demonstrates this by inviting participants to cross boundaries between the sensory experience of traditional environmental practice and that of an art experience. Some borders, however, cannot be crossed and male and female participants can only glimpse at the other’s experience until reunited in the gallery space. Multiple traditions and prescriptions are presented through engagement with multiple boundaries and ecologies. The event is a collaboration between the Mopan Maya community in southern Belize, anthropologists from the universities of South Florida and Oxford and the art communities of San Francisco and Miami. It takes theoretical and practical inspiration from medical anthropology, ecological anthropology, educational anthropology, art theory and social medicine, but hopes to be of interest across disciplinary borders. Participants are asked to allow 30 minutes to complete the event.

Click here to see photos of our PopUp event at the Hayes Valley Farm in downtown San Francisco, 18 November 2012!

We could not think of a better space to present “embodied ecological heritage” in downtown San Francisco than on this absolutely stunning urban farm. In 2013, developers “reclaimed” the land and pushed the farm off of the property to make way for condos and shops. We feel so privileged that we we were able to utilize this amazing space while it still existed. Get involved with urban farming in San Francisco with 49 Farms.

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Click here to see photos of our exhibition at the Gray Mockingbird Community Garden as part of its Interdependence Day Celebration on 12/12/12!

It was a spectacular evening at the Gray Mockingbird Community Garden, chock full of community enthusiasm, activism and art, and we even planted some of the corn seed, as selected by participants of our exhibition!

Click here to see photos of our installation at the Growing Green Communities: Preserving Food Traditions conference, 12 January 2013!

Big thanks to Slow Foods | Glades to Coast and Pine Jog Environmental Education Center for hosting this amazing conference that focused on food traditions and community-building amongst home gardeners, beekeepers, corporate farmers, restauranteurs, scholars and activists.