FORWARD: Issue #6: Climate
Population Displacement
DISPLACEMENT: Uncertain Journeys exhibitions seek to inspire awareness and empathy in conference delegates and contribute to finding creative policy solutions to disaster displacement. Antarctic Village No Borders, and Antarctica World Passport Office, by Lucy + Jorge Orta, installed at Marrakech in 2018. Photo by Gorm Ashurst, courtesy DISPLACEMENT.
As heat extremes are making places less habitable, as drought alters agriculture and food security, as storms of unprecedented strength batter geographies from coastlines to mountainsides, people are increasingly forced to flee their homes for safety.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that climate-related events are already causing an average of more than 20 million people to leave their homes and move to other areas in their countries each year, much of this displacement in the Global South.
While governmental bodies rarely grant climate refugees the same consideration as political refugees, artists are elevating this phenomenon and the lived challenges of people displaced by this crisis. We highlight two such projects—one at home and one with multiple locations worldwide.
To warn Floridians that they may be displaced by a rising ocean, an artist created yard signs that indicate how close a home is to sea level. A diverse global coalition of artists is taking the issue of population displacement directly to policymakers at international convenings on issues such as migration and refugee law. Artists are collaborating to display films, sculptures, and performances that make displacement personal and visceral for attendees, and hoping to inspire action toward policy change.
Keep reading to find out how artists are underscoring the plight of the climate-displaced and inspiring action to meet their needs.
The Underwater
Residential yard signs highlighted dangerous sea-level elevations and inspired social engagement.
Location: Miami-Dade County, Florida, and later the Gulf Coast states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
Artist Role: Communicating complex data | A public artist teamed up with a local high school and homeowners to create yard signs that signal sea-level elevations and give residents tools to take action.
Artist: Xavier Cortada.
Partners + Partner Organizations: Artist-led, with students from Miami Senior High School and local homeowners.
The Underwater is a multipart project designed to reveal the vulnerability of coastal communities to rising seas, spark climate conversations, and catalyze civic engagement. Photos courtesy the artist.
In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, sea levels are expected to be 10 to 17 inches higher in 2040 than they were in 2000, resulting in broader flood zones, hurricane storm surges, and increasing risks to life and property. In 2022, Miami artist Xavier Cortada, whose community-based work generates awareness and action around climate change, sea-level rise, and biodiversity loss, received a 2022 Creative Capital Award for The Underwater, which he launched in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood that year with the help of more than 2,000 students from his alma mater, Miami Senior High School.
The multipart project, designed to reveal the vulnerability of coastal communities to rising seas, to spark climate conversations, and to catalyze civic engagement, includes "Underwater Elevation Markers"—yard signs that announce a home or business’s elevation above sea level, from 0 to 17 feet, and offer a QR code for exploring online information and getting people involved in local climate action. Among the resources that show up is the project’s website, which offers “Underwater Intel,” science, technology, business, and cultural information to deepen participants’ climate education.
The Underwater originated in 2018 as the Underwater Homeowners Association in the village of Pinecrest, where the artist's studio is located, complete with monthly meetings. Members were organized around a shared concern, similar levels of property elevations, because, as Cortada notes in his artist statement, it is “the most important metric any coastal community need consider.” By asking participants to join the Underwater HOA, Cortada engaged his neighbors as problem solvers. Said one Pinecrest participant, “Yes, it’s an art project, but the strength of the project is being able to bring people together.” Participants would either make their own elevation yard signs to post in front of their homes, or install one of Cortada's pre-printed signs. During Art Basel Miami, the Village encouraged each of its 6,000 residents to join this initiative and raise awareness about the climate crisis.
I developed The Underwater to help my neighbors understand our vulnerability to rising seas and give them the tools to take action.
— Xavier Cortada, artist
“I developed The Underwater to help my neighbors understand our vulnerability to rising seas and give them the tools to take action,” Cortada says. “In ways that only art can, The Underwater seeds ideas of both responsibility and agency. For Miamians, this initiative brings the urgency of the climate crisis straight to their front door—hyperlocal and personal. It also uplifts and amplifies the voices of those who often go unheard in the pursuit of climate justice for all.”
After the 2018 election, the artist put out an appeal through local news media outlets for locals to turn their old campaign signs into reminders of the threat of sea level rise, to broaden the conversation. In summer 2022, Cortada placed elevation markers at city halls in four coastal states—Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—indicating the buildings’ elevations above sea level. These sites were chosen to highlight the threat that rising sea levels pose to the cities’ future tax bases, in the places where their leaders make decisions about municipal budgets, land use, planning, and zoning.
“I want to create processes where we begin to understand what’s going to happen to Miami-Dade County, and I want policies that find an equitable answer to that,” says Cortada. “Some people know what the problem is and they’re hedging their bets. Other people are clueless. There has to be policy that addresses the divide. . . and that policy has to be equitable so that if someone is going to lose everything and someone else is going to gain, there is a process that elected officials develop to manage that. I want us to begin to understand how as a community we solve this, the greatest problem we are facing.”
"Underwater Elevation Markers" are yard signs that announce a business or home's elevation above sea level, from 0 to 17 feet.
Artist Xavier Cortada meets with fellow homeowners at a monthly Underwater HOA planning meeting in his home community.
The artist collaborated with 2,000 Miami High School students on signage for The Underwater.
I want to create processes where we begin to understand what’s going to happen to Miami-Dade County, and I want policies that find an equitable answer to that.
— Xavier Cortada, artist
An Underwater HOA intersection designated at 9 feet above sea level.
DISPLACEMENT: Uncertain Journeys
Drawing on a variety of art practices, artistic interventions directed at international policymakers at diplomatic conferences highlight the critical importance of addressing disaster displacement.
Location: Global
Artist Role: Amplifying urgency | Artists who have created existing interventions that provide or explore alternative solutions to address the challenges of disaster displacement are identified by the project. When possible, artists attend exhibitions at diplomatic conferences to engage delegates in interactive artworks and/or discuss how their art practice relates to international policymaking on disaster displacement.
Artists: Multiple.
Partners + Partner Organizations: Platform on Disaster Displacement, Norwegian Refugee Council, UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, COAL (Coalition for Art and Sustainable Development), Anticipation Hub, Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR), University of the Arts London, and the Humanitarian Collaborative, University of Virginia.
The DISPLACEMENT project primarily shows existing artworks that address a specific policy context. Through artistic interventions, the exhibitions seek to inspire awareness and empathy in conference delegates and contribute to finding creative policy solutions to disaster displacement. DISPLACEMENT exhibition on the lake border in Geneva, Switzerland commissioned by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) as part of its activities for the 2019 Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction. Photo by Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat. All photos courtesy DISPLACEMENT.
Each year, climate- and weather-related events drive tens of millions of people from their homes. As climate change causes more extreme weather, growing food insecurity, and rising sea levels, more people will become displaced by climate disasters. Natural hazards like earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions can also force people to flee. Many people who lose their homes in these disasters are not considered refugees, and thus are not afforded the same international protections as those fleeing war or political turmoil.
DISPLACEMENT is a collaborative art project that cultivates artist responses to the millions of people displaced every year by climate change. It brings together the worlds of contemporary art and policymaking to focus more sharply on the human side of disaster displacement as it intersects with climate change, refugee law, international migration, disaster risk reduction, development, and human rights. The project is an international policymaking initiative within the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD), a multination consortium based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Among the regions most affected by displacement are Central America, East and West Africa, South America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. DISPLACEMENT’s organizers seek to partner with artists from those areas and incorporate their work into the project.
All of the exhibitions seek to inspire awareness and empathy in conference delegates and contribute to finding creative policy solutions to disaster displacement.
Delegates at the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) Civil Society Days at Marrakech in 2018 carried The Inflatable Island in support of all people forced to flee disasters. Photo by Gorm Ashurst.
DISPLACEMENT primarily shows existing artworks that address a specific policy context. Two works that were developed in collaboration with the project are You Never Know, One Day You Too Might Become a Refugee by Lena Dobrowolska and Teo Ormond-Skeaping, a speculative film about a UK family fleeing climate change impacts and finding refuge in the Global South; and the silent video Aléa by Rhino Ariefiansyah and Marie Velardi, in which quotes from people displaced by flooding in western France are combined with the artists’ views of what can be learned from the disaster. Other interventions include The Inflatable Island by Søren Dahlgaard, in which conference attendees carry the “island” as a symbolic act of rescue; and Lucy and Jorge Orta’s Antarctica World Passport, which simulates the allowance of visa-free travel all over the world, representing the idea of borderless citizenship and easier crossings for the disaster-displaced. All of the exhibitions seek to inspire awareness and empathy in conference delegates and contribute to finding creative policy solutions to disaster displacement.
As DISPLACEMENT cofounder and curator Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat explains, “Artists can build imaginary worlds and play with utopian ideas to explore alternative solutions to address challenges related to disaster displacement.”
The late Saleemul Huq (International Centre for Climate Change and Development), Dina Ionesco (International Organization for Migration), and DISPLACEMENT curator Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat, serving as moderator, discuss the role of art in intergovernmental climate negotiations in December 2019 at COP25 Madrid. DISPLACEMENT: Uncertain Journeys brings contemporary art into intergovernmental meetings to talk about disaster displacement and its complexities in an approachable and inviting way. Photo by the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD).
Artistic interventions include distributing personalized stamped passports “allowing” visa-free travel. Artists Lucy and Jorge Orta collaborate with scientists, intellectuals, academics, and civil society to mobilize as many people as possible into the artwork. Above, Artist Lucy Orta (left) hands an Antarctica World Passport to the Foreign Secretary of Bangladesh, H.E. Shahidul Haque, (right) at the GFMD in Marrakech. As they distributed the passport for citizens to become global citizens, the artists heard many touching human stories of migration. They hope that they can bring people together to act through the mobilizing effect of the art. Photo by Gorm Ashurst.
At the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in Bali, Indonesia, in May 2022, the DISPLACEMENT exhibition featured contemporary artworks and socially engaged art projects addressing local disaster displacement risk. Here, Gustaff Harriman Iskandar (facing camera) and Reina Wulansari (far right) from Indonesian art collective Common Room speak with Global Platform delegates about their work at the DISPLACEMENT Innovation Platform booth. Photo by Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat.
Gustaff Harriman Iskandar presents Common Room’s work with an indigenous Indonesian community during a PDD-sponsored official side event. Photo by Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat.
Daily artist talks with delegates inspired fresh ideas and centered the human stories in policy discussions. Pictured: In Bali, Indonesian anthropologist Rhino Ariefiansyah (left) discusses Aléa, the film he made with Swiss visual artist Marie Velardi, about severe flooding and displacement in Vendée, France with DISPLACEMENT curator Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat and Nick Bishop of IOM (left). Photo by PDD.
FORWARD: Issue #6
Climate
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