Projects Archive : Page 2 of 4 : Placemaking

Connecting People to Trees

Isabella Bobrow, UC Santa Cruz

The goal of this project is to explore the emotional connections people have with trees. Especially on the UC Santa Cruz campus, trees are the primary markers of place and central to the community’s identity. This project is partially inspired by two projects connecting people to trees: Cooking Sections’ “Offsetted,” which explored the rights of trees, and the Melbourne Urban Forest initiative, which mapped trees and invited people to email them. Both are based in a specific geographic region, as will this.

The focus of this installation would be a circle of “parts” of trees suspended in space with metal supports. These “parts” would be dead branches, leaves, or fallen trunks – whatever can be harvested without hurting the organism. Each will be given a description in the pamphlet, and the metal supports will have hooks on them that allow people to leave responses. I intend to make a film approximately 15 minutes long, which would be played on a projector, of people interacting with their favorite trees and speaking to them. The exchange between person and tree is one in which the tree is mostly silent. It has a history, but personality is projected onto it by the people who enjoy its presence. As such, the majority of the work comes from the responses people give. There will be an area for people to share what the trees mean to them via poems, letters, drawings, or other expressions of love.

People’s intimate relationships with natural objects like plants, fungi, and soil are vital to their sense of place. The world over, people remember the tree in the backyard of their childhood home. People chain themselves to trees they don’t want to see felled. Children read “The Giving Tree.” For UC Santa Cruz, trees are often the most significant landmarks. Although we cycle through every four years, they stay, and are ascribed different personalities by the people who come to know them. In academia trees have financial and ecological value, but emotional value is rarely discussed. The most beloved of all is sequoia sempervirens, called “California redwood” by some. It is a symbol of California and of UCSC, and projects that would dare to cut one down are met with disgust. This project is an innocent and emotional exploration of these relationships.

M.U.R.A.L. (Making Urgent Radical Art League)

Professors Enrique Leal and Laurie Palmer, UC Santa Cruz

M.U.R.A.L. invites proposals from current and former UC Santa Cruz art students for murals to be installed on campus Fall 2020. The irony of making a mural in real space in the time of COVID and when we expect most fall classes to happen online is not lost on us. M.U.R.A.L. provides a forum for expression in this intense time of uncertainty, grief, and rage, as well as a platform for the creative work of students.

We welcome students back to campus with messages of solidarity and community, even if that welcome may be, for the moment, a virtual image of an actual artwork located in real space. One mural will be chosen for installation in each space for this fall. The chosen designs will express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and/or with related movements working in solidarity to end systemic racism, police violence, and/or the prison system. It might do this by re-telling art history or visually enacting other historic reparations. It might honor people or events that have had a significant impact on struggles for social or economic justice. Or, it might address solidarity with these movements and urgent issues in ways that we can’t imagine.

A Secret History of American River People

Wes Modes, UC Santa Cruz

A Secret History of American River People (https://peoplesriverhistory.us) is a Santa Cruz-based project with national impact that builds a collection of personal stories of people who live and work on rivers from the deck of a recreated mid-century shantyboat over a series of epic river voyages. The project examines the ways that river communities respond to threats to river culture such as economic displacement, gentrification, environmental damage caused by generations of river modification, and the effects of global climate change.

In 2019 and 2020, we will focus on stories from the San Lorenzo River and the historic Ohio River. We make our way downriver in a rustic houseboat, built by the artist, loosely based on designs from shantyboats in the 1940s, from largely recycled and reclaimed materials. Traveling on the river in an authentic shantyboat and taking the time to listen to people’s stories makes this project unique, inspires deep wonder and connects meaningfully with people’s personal histories. The Open Classroom Mini Grant will support the creation of a 5-6 minute short documentary film that explores the work of the Secret History project. The documentary will cover the research, the voyages, the forgotten history of people living on or adjacent to the river, and the invisible history of those not included in the dominant historical narrative, prominently centering the voices of interviewees. The grant will facilitate the creation of UCSC student-based research groups over two quarters, editing, and release.

We work to help build stronger, more connected, and more diverse river culture and river communities. Our primary activities, conducting fieldwork, collecting stories, and sharing those stories, directly support this mission. The project recalls Suzanne Lacy’s dialogical works, the community-based work of Helen and Newton Harrison, and the contemporary water-based practice of Mary Mattingly, Eve Mosher, and others. One of the critical questions we ask, is “How do rivers connect us?” Most communities are sited at the riverside and their residents are river people who have important stories about their lives, their communities, and the river. These stories connect us as individuals and as communities facing the emerging crises of economic displacement, gentrification, environmental degradation, and the effects of global climate change on inland waterways.

This work emerges out of research for my UCSC Digital Art and New Media MFA for which I won a UCIRA grant and student-based project groups I lead. I continue to be a California-based artist and UC faculty. In 2017 my fieldwork focused on the Sacramento River. This year, the Santa Cruz Arts Council asked me and the Secret History project to take a central role in Ebb & Flow, the annual celebration of the San Lorenzo River. I collaborated with the Ebb & Flow team to stage a series of 20 short video interviews highlighting the personal stories, ecology, and history of local people connected with the San Lorenzo River. This work allowed me to bring my experience working on rivers nationwide to our local San Lorenzo River.

Intersecting Data Fields: An Arts & Genomics Collaboration

Jennifer Parker and Karolina Karlic, UC Santa Cruz

This project was born out of a desire to mobilize the power of art to tell a story about the diversity of the people, work, and impact of the Genomics Institute. Artists and Professors Jennifer Parker and Karolina Karlic invited all Genomics Institute faculty, researchers and staff to participate in a portrait series that uncovered the lens through which genomics is seen by the people who live and work in it. Each person was asked to bring an object of significance — something that inspired their being, personally and professionally. The result is a stimulating exploration of the diversity of the group as seen not only through the eyes and expressions, but also through the objects that reflect influences beyond the immediate work space. Given the times available to photograph, not all faculty, researchers and staff of the Genomics Institute were able to participate; those that did represent the extraordinary diversity of the group — from graduate student researchers in cancer, to undergraduate employees who are invaluable to making things operate well, to brilliant computational scientists whose research is dedicated to using genomics to protect species

Karlic and Parker approached their project as a socially engaged art practice, inviting people working with the institute to participate in a photo shoot to document individuals behind genomics research and to document a historic moment for UCSC as it unveils its new home to campus and the public. The participatory element of socially engaged art practice is key, as the project was crafted to spark social interactions with the arts and inspire a new sense of belonging for diverse collaborators merging together to create a shared work environment. Karlic and Parker invited individuals to bring an object of interest or curiosity to be photographed in addition to having their portrait taken. The artwork created is of equal importance to the collaborative act of creating them

The Arts + Genomics initiative is driven by curiosity, intrigue and the general desire to expand research opportunities with art, science, technology and engineering. Spearheaded in 2019 by the Genomics Institute and the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center at UC Santa Cruz, this initiative is designed to establish a platform for artists and scientiﬁc researchers to collaborate and exchange ideas. Artists and scientists both chase the exhilaration of “knowing” something new and important. The urge to share this knowledge with others is strong for both. It is our hope that these intersections will ignite interdisciplinary research questions that invite the philosophical, scientiﬁc, political and theoretical models of life.

We Belong: Collaboration for Community-Engaged Research and Immigrant Justice

Sean Macnaughton, UC Santa Cruz

We Belong is a Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER) project designed to mentor first-generation undergraduate researchers, while generating new, locally actionable knowledge on the experiences of mixed-status immigrant families in Santa Cruz. We have begun to collect photographs made by students in the Sociology 139T Research Practicum course associated with We Belong that are representative of their subjective definition of belonging, while other students in the class reachout to members of the aforementioned communities and conducting interviews. “Spaces” photographed won’t be restricted to physical locations or places; they are images representative of communities that make the picture-makers feel at home or apart of something greater than themselves, or they can be structures or power dynamics that contribute to belonging or not belonging. We hope to answer the question “what does it mean to belong?” and display it in public areas with the intention that others may be able to better understand the experience and phenomenon of belonging.

The aim of this project is to produce a visual narrative and definition of what it means to “belong.” This collection is the visual documentation aspect of We Belong: Collaboration for Community-Engaged Research and Immigrant Justice, a research project headed by the UC Santa Cruz Sociology Department that centers around the experiences of individuals from families of mixed citizenship statuses in Santa Cruz county. We Belong is a Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER) project designed to mentor first-generation undergraduate researchers, while generating new, locally actionable knowledge on the experiences of mixed-status immigrant families in Santa Cruz. We have begun to collect photographs made by students in the Sociology 139T Research Practicum course associated with We Belong that are representative of their subjective definition of belonging, while other students in the class reachout to members of the aforementioned communities and conducting interviews. “Spaces” photographed won’t be restricted to physical locations or places; they are images representative of communities that make the picture-makers feel at home or apart of something greater than themselves, or they can be structures or power dynamics that contribute to belonging or not belonging. We hope to answer the question “what does it mean to belong?” and display it in public areas with the intention that others may be able to better understand the experience and phenomenon of belonging.

Melt Me into the Ocean

Yolande Harris, UC Santa Cruz

Can learning to listen to underwater sound transform us and our relationship to the environment?

Melt Me Into The Ocean focuses on expanding our relationship to the Monterey Bay through underwater sound. The project brings together expertise from local communities in different forms of listening, from science, arts and sound healing, to help shape a more integrated awareness of the ocean. The study of underwater sound as a harbinger of environmental change exposes the impact of uncontrolled anthropogenic sound, and enables insights into the many marine species of this area. Imaginatively accessing this otherwise inaccessible environment, encourages empathy, remote presence and more active engagement in crucial environmental issues. I will integrate this research with UCSC students in the year-long Electronic Music Workshop.

We will work with scientific researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), learning practices in ocean sound gathering and analysis, technological developments of hydrophones, sound processing and machine learning algorithms, sonification of ocean data and identification of ocean sounds. We will also work with sound therapists to understand techniques for facilitating psychological healing through sound and listening. The aim is to integrate these listening experiences, both to create a series of sonic interventions along coastal sites of the Monterey Bay, and contribute to directions in scientific research.

As Research Associate at UCSC, I am focusing on sound and the embodied local experience of place on the edge of the Monterey Bay. As a small city of Santa Cruz, how can we integrate our diverse expertise on sound and listening, and deepen our commitment to environmental issues by focusing our sonic imagination? This year I developed a collaboration with MBARI accessing sounds from their deep ocean hydrophone from the cabled observatory in the Monterey Canyon. Using these sounds and others I collected myself, I developed a series of site-specific public sound events and walks in Santa Cruz, exploring embodied listening and connectedness to the uninhabitable ocean. This included the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, Ebb and Flow Festival, the experimental music platform Indexical, a women’s trauma healing retreat, a sound healing event at the Pacific Cultural Center, and funding from the Santa Cruz Arts Council, culminating in an installation at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Building on the positive response to these works (with forthcoming presentations at ISEA Korea and Lincoln Pops Festival Nebraska), a Placemaking MiniGrant would enable me to launch the next phase of a collaboration with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), including new work with environmental non-profit California Ocean Alliance. Ideally this would lead to further developing my interdisciplinary research and teaching on Art, Sound and the Ocean at UCSC.

We Are Here: Endangered Species of Santa Cruz County

Juniper Harrower, UC Santa Cruz

We are losing many species at alarming rates because of our impacts on the Earth’s ecosystems. As a scientist Juniper uses her arts research practice to impact and highlight issues facing local communities. For this placemaking grant, she proposed to work with her students to create 3 projects that focus on endangered Santa Cruz county organisms: 1) an illustrated field guide, 2) exhibition ready artwork, and 3) participatory community printmaking. Students worked with researchers at the UCSC greenhouses, arboretum, and UC Reserves to illustrate threatened species, creating detailed imagery for key morphological aspects. The organisms were illustrated in the format of a triptych, used traditionally to commemorate death and loss.

She published the work in a field guide alongside natural history descriptions for the organisms and their anthropogenic threats, including a section with suggested behavioral shifts, eco-actions, and key policies and initiatives that support species sustainability. Each student carved a linoleum block of their organism for public printmaking that was held at numerous outreach events. They created 3D etched spheres of each organism (engraving will be outsourced). The ghost-like hologram etching symbolizes species loss reminding us that soon many species will only exist in memoriam, while the spheres reference fortune telling crystal balls – the organisms are not extinct yet, but could be in the near future.

This project engages the the nature/culture divide and links local species iconography to the bigger issue of human induced species loss to generate empathetic responses and hopefully motivate behavioral shifts. This was accomplished by engaging students directly in scientific research that is occurring for selected threatened organisms, and studying them at the greenhouses, the arboretum, in the classroom,

*Printmaking at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History*

and in their native habitats to create art.This will expand to include community members through multiple participatory outreach events that will feature the linocut carvings, share the guidebook and exhibit the artwork. The sculptures will be displayed with the triptych illustrations, the field guide, and the printmaking activity at future Norris Center events, and we will also seek other exhibition opportunities both on and off campus.

Preventable Deaths, Santa Cruz County Jail

Sharon Daniel, Jenny Reardon, ROXY DAVIS, and Sin Barras members Leslie Potenzo and Rebekah Mills, UC Santa Cruz

From 2012 to 2016, there were five preventable deaths in the Santa Cruz County jail, more than twice the national per capita average. Amid news of these deaths and a lack of transparency about the healthcare provided in the jail, local prison abolition group Sin Barras reached out to university researchers to investigate. There are many unanswered questions about healthcare quality and access issues at the jail, including basic information about people’s experiences of medical treatment during their incarceration and after their re-entry into the community. This project is a collaboration between the social sciences, the arts and the community to explore conditions and healthcare provision in local jails. The research team is composed of Psychology graduate student Roxy Davis, Film and Digital Media professor Sharon Daniel, Sociology professor Jenny Reardon, and Sin Barras members Leslie Potenzo and Rebekah Mills. Last year, Roxy conducted an initial study that involved interviewing 14 formerly incarcerated people; participants consistently shared experiences of treatment lapses, poor quality of care, and harmful and dehumanizing conditions. The proposed project for this grant builds on the previous study. Roxy will work with Professor Daniel to conduct additional interviews and develop a prototype for an interactive, online documentary that will create awareness of the inadequate care in the Santa Cruz jail and generate momentum for policy change.

The Santa Cruz County main jail is located just steps from downtown Santa Cruz, but the people incarcerated there are isolated from their community by both physical and symbolic barriers. Jails are spaces of exclusion where prisoners are rendered invisible to the general public. Their invisibility makes them vulnerable to neglect and subject to treatment that the general public would find unacceptable, if they could see it. By recording and publishing the testimonies of those whom the jail’s healthcare system has failed, we hope to bring those who have been marginalized and excluded through the criminal justice system together with the greater Santa Cruz community and to activate the community to support their human right to health care. From its inception, this project has been about strengthening and uniting local communities that have been separated by physical space or ideological barriers. The research team includes both university-affiliated people and Sin Barras activists, and this summer, we will be convening an advisory board of directly impacted people and their family members to ensure that their voices are the ones guiding the continued development of the project. At its heart, this project is about connection: it seeks to connect the university, prisoners and their loved ones, care providers, marginalized people, decision-makers, and the Santa Cruz general public, and unite them around the common cause of creating a healthy and safe community for everyone.