Photo by Megan Dickerson
Ocean Prototype Nights
Episode 1: Reclaiming Native Waterways, from the Kumeyaay Coast to Lake Cahuilla
October 14, 2021
7:00 - 9:00 p.m. PDT
YouTube Stream: https://youtu.be/nLYtFvEkWCs
A livestreamed event in the UC San Diego "Navigating the Pacific" series anticipating Getty Pacific Standard Time "Art + Science" 2024, produced by Paolo Zuñiga of UC San Diego Visual Arts and hosted at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps, Kosay Kumeyaay Market, and Institute for Contemporary Art San Diego.
- 7:00-7:40 – Kumeyaay tule boats (ha kwaiyo) link land and sea, past and present in the Kumeyaay lan- guage and culture revitalization movement. Stanley Rodriguez in dialog with Amy Sara Carroll and Nan Renner at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps.
- 7:40-8:20 – Kumeyaay weaving, from baskets to fishnets, show artistry and ingenuity, drawing from a varied terrain from the coast to the Colorado River. Martha Rodriguez in dialog with Ricardo Dominguez and Elizabeth Newsome at Kosay Kumeyaay Market.
- 8:20-9:00 – Position Vector Salton Sea measures the rapid disappearance of the Salton Sea on tribal lands (site of ancient Lake Cahuilla) in a site-specific art installation created by the Torres Martinez Ca- huilla Desert Indian Tribal Community in partnership with land artist Hans Baumann. Hans Baumann in dialog with James Nisbet, Manuel Schwartzberg Carrió, Guusje Sanders and Joe Riley at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego/North.
Ocean Prototype Nights is supported by UCSD Visual Arts, Institute of Arts and Humanities, the Birch Aquarium at Scripps, ICA San Diego, and the Getty Foundation.
Six live-streamed evening dialogs twice a quarter from October through June around the “Navigating the Pacific” project, a dozen 3-year artist-scientist-scholar collaborations about oceanographic and Indigenous ocean art and science culminating, in 2024, in rolling exhibitions at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps and the Geisel Library. Part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time 2024 regional collaboration of exhibitions, Graphic Ocean and Navigating the Pacific are forthcoming publication and exhibitions promoting intersections between art and science around oceanic conservation, contestation, and communities of practice. These dialogs are "prototypes" in the sense that they show ideas in progress.
See GraphicOcean.org for art/science projects in development at UC San Diego as part of Getty Pacific Standard Time 2024 exhibitions.
Hans Baumann is a Swiss-American artist and land art practitioner. His work addresses the decolonization of Western epistemologies, narratives of ecological collapse and nonhuman timescales. Baumann holds degrees from Harvard University and Prifysgol Caerdydd, and he has lectured throughout the United States and Europe at institutions such as the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania, Universität Bern, and Cornell University. He has been an artist in residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and ArtCenter College of Design’s Media Design Practices Department, and was a 2019-2020 Fellow of the Landscape Architecture Foundation. His essays have appeared in a variety of publications including e-flux architecture and The Invention of the American Desert (UC Press). His projects has been supported by institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Antipode Foundation for Radical Geography, Strelka Institute, and the Getty Foundation. Hans currently resides in Los Angeles.
Amy Sara Carroll is Associate professor of Literature at UC San Diego. Her books include Secession (Hyperbole Books, 2012), winner of the University of Michigan’s 2013 Louis I. Bredvold Prize for Scholarly or Creative Publication and the 2013 Golden Crown Literary Society (GCLS) Poetry Award; Fannie + Freddie: The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography (Fordham UP, 2013), chosen by Claudia Rankine for Fordham University’s 2012 Poets Out Loud Prize; and REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era (University of Texas Press, 2017), which received honorable mention for the 2017 Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, honorable mention for the 2018 Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Best Book in the Humanities, honorable mention for the 2019 Association for Latin American Art-Arvey Foundation Book Award, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. Carroll has been a fellow in program supported by the Mellon (Northwestern University), Rockefeller, NEH, and Cornell Society for the Humanities foundations, among others. Since 2008, she has been a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, coproducing the Transborder Immigrant Tool. The project has been exhibited in various venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Francisco’s Galería de la Raza; ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, Queens Museum of Art, and the 2010 California Biennial. She coauthored with other members of EDT 2.0 several plays and [({ })] The Desert Survival Series/La serie de sobrevivencia del desierto (Office of Net Assessment/University of Michigan Digital Environments Cluster Publishing Series, 2014). Published under a Creative Commons license, the volume has been digitally redistributed by CTheory Books (2015), the Electronic Literature Collection 3 (2016), CONACULTA E-Literatura/Centro de Cultura Digital (2016), and HemiPress (2017). Since Summer 2010, Carroll has participated in Mexico City’s alternative arts space SOMA.
Ricardo Dominguez, Chair of Visual Arts at UC San Diego, was a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (http://critical-art.net/) and a cofounder of Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998 (https://anthology.rhizome.org/floodnet). His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand, the Transborder Immigrant Tool - https://tbt.tome.press/ - (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border) was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the US Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UCSD Center for the Humanities. The Transborder Immigrant Tool, exhibited internationally, was also under investigation by tUS Congress, the FBI, Homeland Security, and UCSD and UCOP in 2009-2010 and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry. he is also is co-founder of *particle group* with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, and Amy Sara Carroll, whose art project about nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* has been presented internationally. He was a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University, a Rockefeller Fellow (Bellagio), and a UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy Fellow. Many of his articles and essays can be found at: https://ucsd.academia.edu/RicardoDominguez
Elizabeth Newsome, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at UC San Diego, is the author of Trees of Paradise and Pillars of the World: The Serial Stelae Cycle of "18-Rabbit–God K," King of Copan (Texas 2010). She is a specialist in the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica, including the Aztec, Olmec and Izapan cultures. Her research focuses primarily on the Classic Maya civilization that flourished in Mexico and Central America from the second to the tenth centuries. Newsome's studies have addressed various aspects of Maya architecture, stone sculpture and hieroglyphic writing, with active field research in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. She teaches and is conducting research on coastal and inland Native American art and material culture. Her disciplinary approaches emphasize iconological interpretation and the study of art in relation to cultural and intellectual history.
James Nisbet is Chair of Art History at UC Irvine. His research addresses modern and contemporary art, theory, and criticism, with particular interests in environmental history, modern science, abstraction, conceptualism, and the history of photography. He is the author of Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (MIT 2014) and Second Site (Princeton 2021), a work that explores new methodologies for understanding the relationship between site-specificity and duration. The Invention of the American Desert (co-edited with Lyle Massey, UC Press 2021) examines interdisciplinary perspectives on the role of desert environments in both experimental modernist culture and ecological disaster. He has been a Consortium Scholar in the Getty Research Institute and a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Cornell Society for the Humanities.
Ana Gloria (Martha) Rodriguez (Kumeyaay from Mat Perhaw) is a weaver, potter, and tribal singer and dancer. She was born and raised in San Jose de la Zorra, one of the five Kumeyaay communities in Baja California, which is renowned for its traditional basket weavers. Martha has taught courses in Kumeyaay basketry, pottery, and food at Kumeyaay Community College, as well as assisting with courses in language and traditional tools. In honor of the Kumeyaay people of Kosay Village (Old Town San Diego), she opened the Kosay Kumeyaay Market in 2021 as a space to support Yuman artists of the lower Colorado River Valley and Baja Norte, to give presence to the artistry of the Yuman group, and also to share Yuman culture with the public.
Stan Rodriguez (Santa Ysabel Band of the Iipay Nation) is an educator, language teacher, maker of traditional boats, tools, and instruments, and a tribal singer. A member of the board of trustees and an instructor at Kumeyaay Community College, he is an advocate for his community’s culture and traditions serving in advising and teaching roles throughout San Diego and Native Kumeyaay communities. A US Navy veteran, he holds a doctorate in education jointly from UC San Diego and Cal State San Marcos, through which he researched and wrote about Kumeyaay language loss and revitalization. He has held an elected position of legislator for the Santa Ysabel Tribe of the Iipay Nation. He formerly worked as a Drug and Alcohol Abuse Counselor and now teaches full time about Kumeyaay language and the methods and culture he learned from his Grandmother and other Kumeyaay Elders.
Guusje Sanders is a curator who has been working in the arts for the past 10 years. She is the Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego and has been with the museum before for over four years. Before joining ICA Sanders was located in the Bay Area and worked at Aggregate Space Gallery in Oakland, CA, and the Walter and McBean Galleries in San Francisco, CA. Sanders completed a Master of Arts in Exhibition and Museum studies at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió is Assistant Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at UC San Diego, where he is also faculty in the Design Lab, co-Director of the Just Transitions Initiative, and member of the Indigenous Futures Institute. An architect and architectural historian, he researches how technologies and infrastructures mediate regimes of racial capitalism and processes of decolonization. Recent publications include, “Decolonial Platform Urbanism,” in the catalogue of the Austrian Pavilion at the 2021 Venice architecture biennial, and “Theorizing Decolonial Modernity: Toward an Architectural History of Jurisdictional Technics,” in the journal Dialectic. He is currently working on his first book project, provisionally titled, Inland Empire: Settler Colonialism, Modern Architecture, and the Rise of American Hegemony. The book focuses on Palm Springs’s settlement upon the Agua Caliente Reservation, theorizing how mid-century modern architecture became a fundamental technology for governing Empire through Indigenous land and migrant labor.