Cultural Ecology& ARTifacts: Meaning Making with Elders is designed as a collaboration with Elders and community to address the impact of plastics and garbage on the village of Badanga.  This site-specific performative installation project is open to community and is aimed to teach guardianship, conservation and reciprocity while reflecting on the actions of our ancestors: the sacrifices made, and the cultures lost. 

The project is deliberately structured toward the next generation of art practitioners, how to address Western Colonial Systems and why they have caused so much destruction to the planet.

All local community members are invited to join the residency/workshop to honor relationships with their own history and share cultural values with the students. Through community workshops and Site-Specific performance, a final performative piece will culminate the project. It will have a digital living life.  The act itself is a form of performance and social practice.  

All of my workshops are open to observation and can happen in outdoor spaces (weather permitting).  Therefore, they can be observed at all times by community. In the workshops the materials are cheap, collected and gathered from one’s own home or via recycled objects and garbage.  The village and its Knowledge Keepers are the stimulus for the project.

INSPIRATION             “When the butterflies would visit” (WTBWV) is a line from the play, THE INVENTION OF SEEDS, by Analisa Dias (participating mentor).  These are the words of an Elder, a South African grandmother, who haunts a goldminer grieving with The Center of the Earth, another character in the play.  In this play/project, we are ALL the center of the Earth.  The “Seed” portion of the play will be performed with Guna community, culminating the 2-week residency/fellowship in Armilla, Panama.

GENERATIONAL          WTBWV is the first convening of ten ecological artists/activists/fellows on Indigenous land in the Guna territory of Panama. Designed to empower the next generation of ecological BIPOC artist/researchers, we seek new ways of working based in community, ecology and nurturing structural change.  Exploratory research includes medicinal plants, marine biology, social practice, ecology, the migration crisis (Guna territory is the only crossing point), and the environmental microplastic crisis and nurdles (more info: https://environmentamerica.org/pennsylvania/articles/what-are-nurdles/). In exchange of precious sacred knowledge, WTBWV residents build prototypes/pilot projects which address both environmental and societal issues caused by western practices.

THE Why?        This project is feeding two birds with one hand.  It helps feed outside ecological ideas to the Guna people, addressing their current struggles around plastic and human migration (a crossing point), while also allowing social practitioners (artists/scientist/activists) to work hands on with BIPOC mentees, building a new generation of practitioners.

Reciprocity, something western culture desperately needs to work on, is the social psychological practice of ecology.  If we as westerners, can shift from capitalistic colonial systems to indigenous practices of living in relationship to the living beings around us, humanity just might have hope.

However, this Indigenous knowledge is getting harder to keep and pass down-- as western culture's failures infiltrate and seep into the community. Plastics from across the world wash up onto the free state’s shores, riddling the beach with plastics which end up inside of everything and everyone. Our hope is that when the younger generation of the Guna see the younger generation of the America's coming to Armilla to study, they will find pride in the work and decide to stay -- instead of leave to the city.

This opportunity will directly impact Favio and Desy, who are the Guna leaders of this project, both enabling them to speak and spread the word about the communities' struggles, while also helping them financially.

This opportunity also allows the next generation of BIPOC social practitioners to get hands on experience in the field.

 

WHAT              Crossroads      I will use my expertise as a curator, networker, culture crosser and social partitioner to build an exhibition with, and for the community.  Through an auto-ethnographic lens, I will translate the knowledge gained from my time with ICArEHB (Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior) into an interactive installation.  This will be accomplished by shadowing João Cascalheira, the director and his team for four months in the spring of 2026.  This translation will manifest into a final exhibition and performance series, open to the public, performed with students and community members. While in Portugal, I will produce artist talks, workshops, classes and mentoring opportunities to build a network of partners/collaborators who will help bring this project to fruition.  I have made a career from producing similar border crossing projects. Please see the portfolio section of this application for examples of this cross-cultural work.

Theatre and the Arts have long been recognized as a tool to reflect upon and shape society. The influence of Greek Theatre on western civilization is hard to dispute. In an era when press and media was not yet a form or a forum, the practice of theatre is how conversations were brought home to dinner tables.  This theater, tied to religious/spiritual rituals, also served as a moral compass for society.  Shakespeare asks us to hold a mirror up to our human nature. Bertolt Brecht takes it further (as I do), asking us to use the artistic tool not only to see our reality—but to re-shape it. Pablo Picasso, whose work, as legend has it, was greatly impacted by the bison cave paintings in the Altamira cave in Spain.  His anti-war painting, Guernica, the bull symbol is prominent and executed in his well-known “primitive” manner. 

This use of symbolism and metaphor (taken from Greek, meaning to transport) is how we will transport the audience to the important work of the Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior.  The first sentence in João Cascalheira’s biography states, “I am an archaeologist interested in prehistoric hunter-gather adaptations, specifically in how these are related to processes of climate and environmental change”.  This is where our research roads cross.  This is where our project begins. 

The crossroads is where ICArEHB and my passions meet to build the goal of this project: To translate the center’s work into digestible material through installation and performance.  Designed as an accessible space to reflect upon humanity’s current growing pains of cultural evolution – while holding a mirror up to our past cultural behaviors in the times of great shifts in human migration, climate change, and disease.

WHERE            Context of Space & Place        According to legend, “the end of the world” is the southernmost region of Portugal (the end of Europe), where a variety of migrating and colonizing communities (Neolithic, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans etc.) worshiped their gods as they watched the sun sink, hissing into the oceanic abyss. Strabo, the Greek geographer and historian describes how no one dared sleep on this scared ground, as this is where the gods would gather at night.

The Romans called it “Promontorim Sacrum”, or “Sacred Cape”.  The Muslims of Iberia called it “west of Andalusia” (Spain).  Under the Moors occupation, translated from the Arabic “gharb al-ʼandalus” or “غرب الأندلس” was shortened just “al-Gharb” and it is now known as “The Algarve”. 

This hallowed land is where prehistoric culture erected megaliths, large stone structures of tombs, alignment circles, and standing stones. Here, is also one of the last holdouts of the Neanderthals—before they were made extinct. 

What happened to our relatives, who left Africa much earlier than us Homo Sapiens? What role did our evolution play in their disappearance? Due to revolutionary advancements in paleoanthropology, our understanding of this creature, who homo sapiens have mythologized, has shifted immensely and can give insight into humanity’s own path to extinction.

HOW   Importance of relationships    Working with Indigenous communities has taught me the power of relationships. Othering is not part of the Indigenous Ways of Knowing. In most languages there is no word for “it”, as all things share life, come from the land, and are part of the same family. Therefore, all things are created equal.  There is no hierarchy.  This is the foundation of the circular path of relationship and reciprocity.

My work with the Indigenous has profound crossover with this project, as both are driven by the need to address humanity’s past behaviors—to adapt and live in a more ecologically harmonized way with the planet.  This proposal is propelled by the need to reflect upon humanity’s current growing pains of cultural evolution.  Indigenous Knowledge centers the earth.  And our earth holds the history of our evolving humanity.  Something our archeologists’ partners have made a life of.

This is not the first time the center has had a colleague from another field join their team.  Prior to this project, ICArEHB had a psychologist who, like me, shadowed their archeological work and was able to apply it to his ideas around children and their fear of the dark. He was interested in connecting our cave dwelling days of the Ice Age to this innate fear of the dark.

I enter this work after holding positions in several academic centers and as the founding director of CoLab.  This will not be the first time I am in residence nor is it the first time that ICArEHB has hosted across disciplines.  This project is a marriage of a center and an artist/academic who processes of discovery are in harmony.  It is a reciprocal relationship in the sense that ICArEHB is sharing their meaning making process with me. In turn of this great gift of knowledge, I will translate that meaning into a public exhibition (interviews, installation, film and performance) of community self-discovery.

WHY NOW      Civilization Collapse    Scientist are gaining a deeper understanding of how human history is an outcome of our own environment. Back in 2020, when trying to make sense of COVID 19, I, like many others looked to the past to try to make sense of the present.  In doing so, I became obsessed with the Bronze Age collapse.  In just a generation, multiple societies around the Mediterranean collapsed—losing languages and writing systems, huge swaths of culture were left without any context to why all these great first civilizations fell simultaneously.

Finally, we have reached an age, where fields can talk with each other—where we can share information and ideas across disciplines.  This has led to the understanding that the Bronze Age Collapse was a perfect storm of climate change, disease, and human migration. Sound familiar?

However, this time we are addressing man-made climate change (greenhouse effect) of which we are only just beginning to see the impacts of.  Prior to 12,000 years ago, hunter-gathers, like our cousins the Neanderthals, we spent around two million years as nomadic creatures who traveled in small bands.  These small numbers gave us agility to move quickly and adjust to the environment around us. We have lost this agility as we are roughly one hundred times larger than compared the population at the height of the Roman Empire.  Our large cities of today with no evacuation sequence is reminiscent of the Bronze Age Collapse. 

THE QUEST-ION          Cultural Evolution       By sharing across disciplines, through a “hive mind”, we gain new perspectives which influence our future ideas.  This cross-pollination replaces an old way of working—parallel but separately from one another.  In this new movement, we are using one other’s work as springboard for our own investigation.

The “transdisciplinary” approach allows us to adapt our ideas in development with other ideas, building that same culture of adaptability we had as nomadic creatures.  This evolutionary adaptability will be key to our survival.  Nations will have to share information and work together, as the impact of global warming alters the land we live on.

Nations will need to shift our way of thinking and start forecasting generations ahead, a common trait of Indigenous cultures.  How can we make amends, prepare ourselves and set the stage to give our future generations an opportunity to thrive in a rapidly changing environment?
 

As the cultural theorist and anthropologist Clifford Gertz says, “Culture is public because meaning is.”  Therefore, we are the meaning makers.  We now have an opportunity to build knowledge, together, across borders and share it with the public to build a new culture of sustainability and in harmony with the planet.  A culture of agility, that recognizes and shares our past mistakes in order to adjust towards the future.  It is our job as scientists, artists, and meaning makers to help spread these ideas towards a common catharsis—a mutual understanding.