What Happens When the Dust Settles?

What Happens When the Dust Settles? will investigate holistic aftercare in relation to death and grief, and in proximity to Latinx, BIPOC, and Indigenous communities. Isabella Marie Garcia will study the history of burial practices and cremation within subtropic / tropic communities. Fueled by interview-based field studies of how these communities take care of loved ones who have passed away and careful documentation of ritual practices through respectful photo captures, What Happens When the Dust Settles? will honor the rhetoric of loss.

Text-a-poem

Text-a-Poem is an innovative SMS service that automates the delivery of poetry via code. Drawing inspiration from the iconic Dial-A-Poem service established by the late poet, artist, and activist John Giorno in 1968, Text-a-Poem aims to bring public poetry to the digital age. During a successful test in January, Luna Palazzolo experimented with a phone number generator page. Participants who texted the word ‘POEM’ to a specific number received a new poem every day for two weeks. With the generous support of the Wavemaker grant, we plan to automate and extend these poetic processes for a period of two months.

The Abortifacient Garden

Throughout human history, writers in many parts of the world have described abortifacients - "that which will cause a miscarriage", any substance that induces abortion. Christina Pettersson will grow an artist-led ‘garden’ devoted to the history of botanical abortifacients, focused on our specific region and local population. This will be a widely sourced local community based project, seeking naturalists, gardeners, healers, scientists, historians, etc. who study plant and human histories.

Mapping Waterscapes

Inspired by Golden Age Miami cafe culture, Floridian coastal ecology, and anthropology, Martina will create a distributable placemat, powered by ESRI-GIS environmental data, highlighting the region’s native land and waterscapes, with a focus on Biscayne Bay, sea-level-rise, and our sacred relationship to water. This visual storytelling project will engage both tourists and locals of all ages and literacy to connect with our Bay and develop coastal resilience.

Transfer

Linking intimate family moments to the Caribbean diaspora at large, Transfer is a series of video works relating the transfer of physical media into digital data to the passing down of nostalgia, folklore, trauma, and genetic memory from family and community members by utilizing home movies, video projection mapping, and the degradation of media otherwise known as generation loss.