Full-time faculty member and artist Fia Backström, and New York based artist Gabriela Salazar address why the climate crisis, a now unavoidable topic, presides in their practice. Through the prism of climate, Fia and Gabriela discussed the importance of collectivity, environment, and non-complacency in relation to their respective projects: Facing Her Land – Notes from elsewhere and Matters in Shelter (and Place, Puerto Rico). Omar Berrada, curator and adjunct instructor in the School of Art, moderated the discussion.
Cooper Union X Climate Week 2019 is a student-led series of events that provides space for The Cooper Union and its broader community to explore and engage in themes, across a variety of disciplines, which examine the many facets of the climate crisis.
This event rook place in the Rose Auditorium at 41 Cooper Square, between Third and Fourth Avenues.
Fia Backström’s work focuses on the fabric of co-existence and the construction of collective subjectivity through the social lives of images and language. Backström, who is also assistant professor in the School of Art, works with imaginary, historical, and current systems, destabilizing authorship and their material semiotics. Her work unfolds in a range of media including photography, text, performance, typography, ephemera, objects, social exchange, and pedagogical methods. Her environments, events, and procedures challenge habitual notions of what constitutes an exhibition – its institutional context, its dialogue with the audience, and even the works of art that are presented.
Through sculpture, drawing, writing, and site interventions, Gabriela Salazar’s projects investigate the relationship between human-made spaces and structures and the unpredictable or invisible forces (the shifting of land, the pressures of gravity, the passing and layering of time) that act upon them. Ultimately, the work reframes how we are affected by the changes in what we create. Gabriela uses found materials and sites, engaging in wordplay, psychogeography, and phenomenology to bring out new associations between the found, the altered, and the made. Within the phenomenological response to the work is the friction between our assumptions about and ideals for the built environment, and its simultaneous, imperfect, transient, and intangible realities.
Omar Berrada is a writer and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma'mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. Previously, he organized public programs at Centre Pompidou, hosted shows on French national radio, ran Tangier's International Book Salon, and co-directed Dubai's Global Art Forum.
The Cooper Climate Coalition, an open body of students, faculty, and staff at The Cooper Union, facilitates conversations, events, and student projects within the institution that center the Climate Crisis and its intersections with races, classes, genders, sexualities, histories, economies, political structures and more.
Along with organizing Cooper Union’s Climate Week programs and events in the fall, the Climate Coalition takes responsibility for fostering interdisciplinarity throughout The Cooper Union in support of environmental action.
