Help reorient responsibility towards to our natural neighbors with our Kickstarter for Kamala Sankaram’s ‘The Last Stand’

April 22nd, 2021

Today, Creative Time launches a Kickstarter campaign in support of artist Kamala Sankaram’s first public artwork, The Last Stand, which opens this July in New York. Sankaram will fuse art, music, and science to present a sound installation featuring an experimental opera composed for and about the trees. The Last Stand invites audiences to consider the life cycle of another species and reestablish our relationship and responsibility to it.
 
Support the Kickstarter now!
 
Sankaram’s project was chosen from over 400 applications to Creative Time’s 2021 Emerging Artist Open Call, which offers the opportunity for an artist to create their first major public artwork. The Last Stand features a soundscape of familiar sounds and vibrational tones that allow the trees to experience the project, alongside a translation of the opera for human audiences. The opera shares the story of a tree’s lifespan from acorn to its last stand — which can reach upwards of 500 years. Calling attention to the climate crisis and environmental degradation, Sankaram’s project aims to foster empathy for the natural world around us and help us to recognize that building interspecies relationships is imperative for our collective survival.
 
Creative Time’s projects are free and open to the public. The Kickstarter campaign will support the expansion of public programming to include the cutting-edge science that inspired the project. Sankaram’s The Last Stand will bring to life Dr. Suzanne Simard’s groundbreaking discoveries that trees communicate and maintain interspecies relationships through underground fungal networks. Disrupting our perception of trees, the classification of the natural world, and the social capacity of non-human entities, Simard’s work highlights how little humans know about other species on earth. Contributions will also ensure the project is carbon-neutral by helping Creative Time purchase the carbon off-sets necessary for the project.
 
Rewards for pledging include: a custom seed package with nurturing instructions, 100% Recycled Cotton shirt made with their partners at EVERYBODY.WORLD, a customized mushroom kit, a virtual music composition masterclass with Kamala, a limited edition excerpt from The Last Stand, a private guided tour of Prospect Park with a local arborist, and more.