Collaboration between Kaitlin Bryson and Matea Friend with original score by Emigdio Turner

video installation, sound 9’ x 6’

We Have Been Dead to the World That is Alive, is a collaborative, intermedia artwork that is confrontational in its acknowledgement of humans’ responsibility for the climate crisis, driven and perpetuated by toxic myths of human exceptionalism and solipsism. The artwork provokes a reckoning with ourselves; to challenge predictable apathy, and instead, cultivate collective care. Working with a combination of found, manipulated, original video and animated content, the visuals provide a solemn lens into a nonlinear history of “isolated” events of extraction, deforestation, resource depletion, erosion, and nuclear violence. Imbricated with ominous visuals of the repercussions of these events – made manifest in the climate crisis – the artwork condenses and distorts time providing insight into the grounding truth that nothing is isolated. We are here together, and we are made of each other; human and more-than human.

Selected text from “A Burning Testament” by Terry Tempest-Williams and “Instructions for Compost” by Bryson and the Submergence Collective run as undercurrents throughout the video connecting the viewer to the reality of now. The text calls out the faults of our species and calls for seeing ourselves interwoven within and accountable to the living world.

Note* text is written from white, western/ized subject positions.