Artist
Re-Locate
Via Anchorage, Alaska
Re-Locate is a collective of immersive ethnographic artists and transdisciplinary partners working with individuals, families, and institutions in Kivalina to understand, make visible, and bring action to Kivalina’s relocation strategies and demands. Re-Locate projects affirm what Kivalina’s leaders have already recognized—that relocation is not just about moving buildings and infrastructure away from climate dangers but an opportunity to build worlds where particular subjectivities, material cultures, cultural practices, and politics can endure and flourish. While culturally specific and situational, these projects also place the village’s relocation efforts within global political movements for climate justice and unheard of socioeconomic change. Through sustained engagement, these wide-ranging art-based projects are making the economic, political, and environmental issues related to relocation visible to global audiences; supporting community discussion and exchange; locating, connecting, and educating new relocation partners; creating spaces where people from displaced communities can share original media and ideas about local ways of life; developing platforms for managing local to global networks of support; hosting collaborative design processes that synthesize project knowledge into culturally specific planning and architecture; contributing to global efforts that are shaping the discourse on climate displacement; and developing practices for working in partnership with climate-displaced communities worldwide.
