ART OF INTERFERENCE
Special Edition 3: Connecting the Dots
Will Wilson:
You can't separate images of native folks without thinking about land, right? So, one of the projects that I'm working on right now is called Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition. It's an ongoing project. I think of it as a counter survey of abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation.
Lutz Koepnick:
This is Will Wilson, a Diné photographer, speaking about his latest project, Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition. Connecting the Dots features more than 100 images of abandoned uranium mines. dump and remediation sites on the Navajo Nation. And like much of Will's earlier work, this project too offers a series of counter images. It challenges how non-native photographers have historically pictured native people, their lives and their lands in the American Southwest.
Will Wilson:
I feel like it's gonna be a project that I'm involved in for the rest of my life. There's over 500 of these sites and I've photographed about a hundred of them. I'm interested in figuring out. better to get information out, but also just inspire young folks who are interested in art thinking about how you can use art to make a public aware and even affect policy or motivate people to sort of take action around issues that they're embedded in.
Lutz Koepnick:
From the 1920s to the 1970s, around four million tons of uranium were mined on the Navajo Nation across an area that was and is home. to more than 250, 000 people. The primary purpose of this mining was the building of atomic weapons during the Cold War. Most of the private mining companies working for the US government during this time left when the Cold War came to an end, abandoning more than 500 mines and tons of hazardous radioactive uranium waste still scattered across the land. Boom became bust, with uncounted numbers of former Diné miners having died of kidney failure and cancer, and babies still being born with dangerous uranium levels.
I am Lutz Koepnick, hosting this special edition of Art of Interference from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In the regular seasons of this podcast, we explore creative responses to climate change. In each episode, we feature the work of different artists, filmmakers, musicians, photographers, or creative makers, and ask how contemporary art navigates our planetary crisis. In our special editions, of which this is the third, we present thought provoking conversations about the arts as transformative media of inquiry, the role of art within the landscapes of higher education, and the interplay between artistic research, scientific discovery, and technology development.
In today's episode, I talk with Will Wilson about his images of abandoned uranium mines and remediation sites on the Navajo Nation. Throughout his career, Will has combined historic photographic processes, digital technology, performance, and installation to address themes of environmental activism, the impact of cultural and environmental change on Indigenous people, and the possibility of cultural survival and renewal.
In fall 2024, Will's work was on view at the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University as part of a project dedicated to the issue of eco grief. I spoke with Will at the Curve Center, surrounded by his images. In this program, you'll also hear from Leah Love, the Center's director, about the Eco-Grief initiative, before Leah and Will discuss the role of contemporary art in transforming artistic practice into a mechanism for positive environmental impact.
Will Wilson: I grew up on the Navajo Nation and in San Francisco. My mom was Diné and my dad was Irish and Welsh, and so I went back and forth between those two pretty distinct cultural spaces.
Lutz Koepnick:
This is a project that you say will follow you for some time. It's been also already with you for a very long time. Probably longer than before you ever had a camera in your hand.
Will Wilson:
Yeah, that's totally true. I went to a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, Tuba City Boarding School, in Tuba City, Arizona, from fourth grade through eighth grade. And during that time, we used to go to this abandoned uranium mill called Rare Metals, because it was like one of the only cool postindustrial ruin spaces that we could go and like spray paint or do adolescent things. You know, I didn't really, it didn't connect with me when I was a kid, like roaming that space, what it was and how important it was.
Lutz Koepnick:
Did you know it was dangerous?
Will Wilson:
I didn't. Rare metals is, is kind of a strange euphemistic way to talk about uranium and radioactive material. This was the 80s, early 80s. I remember watching this movie, I can't remember exactly what it was called, but it was something about the day after.
And it was like the day after a nuclear holocaust, right? I did a speech for our forensics club where I talked about nonproliferation. There was definitely something in the Zeitgeist about issues that had to do with nuclear, but I didn't understand the history of extraction and that it was tied directly to Communities that I was living in at that point.
Lutz Koepnick:
There's about 500 or even more than 500 of these sites on the Navajo Nation. Some of them are just dump sites. Some are abandoned mines some some of them are remediation sites They seem to be in pretty remote areas, some of them are very close to Monument Valley if I understand it correctly, so you actually have probably a good number of people that come by, but they probably don't know anything about these sites.
Will Wilson:
I mean they are sort of invisible. I think culturally people are aware of them, especially now, because it's become more and more of a public health issue. On one level, everybody knows somebody who's succumbed to some strange cancer. There's something known as Navajo neuropathy, and it's associated with defects that occur because a mother has ingested radioactive material, like either water or through sheep.
That's really one of the main vectors that the contamination gets into people, aside from breathing. They're invisible, but they're also in these localities where Navajo folks are shepherds. A lot of them do have signs, but when you're in such a vast space and there's one little sign on the horizon, you'll either go there because it's this oddity, or you just ignore it, you know.
It's one of the reasons why I think the drone photography opened up this capacity because you can see the bigger picture and really understand how the land was shifted and moved in ways that you can't really understand from the ground because it's just such a vast space.
Lutz Koepnick:
We're sitting in a room where we're actually surrounded by some of these images. They're all very carefully framed. They're all done from an elevated point of view because of the drone, stark contrasts, really dynamic lines. We see a sliver of the horizon on pretty much all of them. They have a kind of strange beauty, a kind of toxic beauty. Talk a bit about how you approach the question of composition for these images.
Will Wilson:
I'm still really fascinated with the perspective that the drone gives you, you know, it's like this god's eye view or this strange surveillance like look down onto the world from these heightened perspectives. For me as the pilot photographer, I really feel like I'm looking at the world from outer space, you know, it's almost like this out of body experience, you know, you get really entranced. The framing is definitely something that's very intentional.
A lot of these are composites. I've kind of blended a number of images together. A lot of these images aren't that high in elevation, they're between maybe 000 feet, but it really does enable you to understand how big some of these sites are that you really have no sense from the ground. The drone has definitely opened up a lot of capacity for, for thinking about environmental injustice and bearing witness to that.
There's the aesthetics of it, it's really beautiful land, and some of the images become these abstract sort of expressionist like fields of color. I'm, I'm not trying to aestheticize something that's tragic, but it comes up often in discussion. I think if people are compelled to learn more about the issue from the images, then it's permissible.
You know, on some level, it's like kind of bringing ethics and aesthetics together and just thinking about how beauty might also invoke an ethic when thinking about land, you know, about representation. I'm hoping to at least have a few hundred of these and have these archives or these editions that will have weight just because of the number.
When they sit alone, maybe they're not that compelling, but I think when you start looking at the enormity of the impact of this history, it becomes this powerful thing.
Lutz Koepnick:
They have a strange kind of beauty. They also look postapocalyptic at times. And with the exception of a few, most of them are really completely empty of human life, or empty even of plant life, empty of animal life.
Is evacuating them of life, is that just sort of documenting what you see, or is that also a way of reclaiming maybe these sites for better uses in the future?
Will Wilson:
I do think about them as portraits of land. Something has happened on them that has in some ways violated them. Really the main reason that there's not evidence of people is because a lot of these sites are out in the middle of nowhere, right?
They're out in the middle of nowhere for everybody but the people who live close to the site. Predominantly, the images that I've taken so far are from the western part of the Navajo Nation, which I'm most familiar with. That landscape is very, it feels like home to me. It feels very natural for me to navigate those spaces.
This is like rangeland primarily for the people who live in that region. The names of the mines are often associated with grazing permit holders. A lot of those families are still there, and they've roamed these landscapes.
Lutz Koepnick:
Do you share your images with them as well to see sites probably in a way that they've never seen them before?
Will Wilson:
I haven't done that yet. It's definitely something that I want to do. Right now, the main focus is trying to build an app that will serve as a public awareness vehicle so that you will know where these minds are in relation to where you are, right? Because there's been a fair amount of assessment done, and some of them are relatively benign.
But some of them are still very radioactive and there's people who live close to them or potentially, that's grazing land. I'm hoping to get a beta version of the app going for this summer and then go and test the app and make sure that it can see me in relation to these sites. One of the goals is to use it as a way to aggregate different kinds of data and information.
The photographs will be that first layer as well as the site screening reports which were collaboratively produced. The Navajo Nation, EPA and the federal EPA assessed about 450 of these sites. It's public information, but I think a lot of people know about them. There's been talk of like citizen science sampling or that kind of data aggregation through the app
Lutz Koepnick:
Photography in the 19th and 20th century was so critical in surveying the West, but in surveying it also opened it up for appropriation, colonization, extraction. Photography was never innocent at that time, and what you're doing, you're reversing that tradition. It's a very strong photographic statement as well, or photo historical statement.
Will Wilson:
That's, that's why I call it a counter survey in some ways. It's like this Indigenous person remaking another account of something that has occurred on the land with photography. I do a fair amount of photography on the ground. But I have yet to figure out how to incorporate that in, in the series. I've been doing this in collaboration with Diné College for a few years, and we did a speaker series that was targeted at Diné students at the college, to inspire them to see a different approach to shifts in public policy or public awareness. The art could do that, right? I think we were hoping, or are hoping, to build a curriculum around this.
Lutz Koepnick:
Let me ask you about this term remediation you used earlier. In media studies, when we use the term remediation, we talk about the process by which, for instance, film would incorporate photography. Or a photograph of a theater stage is a remediation of the theater stage into the photographic image. So the one medium uses the other in order to produce something third. So it's an aesthetic term as well. In your work, it of course also means reclaiming the land, maybe making it livable again. When I hear you use it, I hear both an aesthetic to this, but also an ethics and a politics, and I'm curious about the use of that term in the overall project.
Will Wilson:
One of the ideas is to sort of indigenize this notion of, of remediation. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but trying to figure it out and trying to bring people to the table who may have a perspective to tease out what, what that can be. I'm going to be thinking about a different way of understanding land as a living agent.
And not only thinking about that kind of a shift, but creating a framework for better understanding the fact that if we don't take care of the land. That we ourselves are going to be poisoned, you know, um, which seems very logical in the West. Land is not seen as, as alive. It's only seen as this resource to be, to be exploited or extracted.
Shifting the way that we think about remediation, the goal was to bring those voices to, to the table to, to help us understand better.
Lutz Koepnick:
What I love about the usage of that term in this context is really that we often think of mediation as something very technical and very abstract, but the process of remediation is one that brings the life back to the land, restitches it somehow.
Will Wilson:
I really like those ideas. One of the things we were thinking about was to engage medicine people, and is that something that could be part of a remediation process, where there are prayers that are said for the land, there are apologies to the land, asking for forgiveness, and for reintegration of ourselves to, to these spaces that have been wrong.
There's this really interesting quote that I came across in a text that is the history of uranium extraction processing on the Navajo Nation. One of the things that really struck me is they're interviewing an elder, and the elder retold this story of the holy people coming.
And saying, okay, you know, you humans can use one of these two yellow substances, right? They're both very powerful, but whichever one you choose, you have to leave the other one alone because it's going to bring sickness, it's going to bring evil, it's going to bring danger. And so people chose tadidiin, which is corn pollen, which is this life giving force.
It just seems like the inference was uranium is the other thing that you're supposed to leave in the ground. I'm just thinking about like old stories or creation narratives, um, in relation to this, but on a completely different level. It's also just acknowledging that this stuff has happened and that these people were sold these jobs that they were doing as important economic development that was happening at home.
That was supporting a country that was in the process of defending itself. I think people really bought into that idea of national defense, but nobody was warned of how dangerous this stuff was. And now in this moment where we're all looking for important ways to generate energy without emitting carbon, nuclear is back on the table again.
Lutz Koepnick:
In a different project, the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, you used a tagline asking: What if Indians invented photography? Yeah. Looking at this work and how you have engaged photography in your career in so many different ways. You've done landscape and portrait photography. You've used tintype, you've used drones.
Photography is a very open field for you and it seems to change and has developed over time. Coming back to that question, what if Indians invented photography, is there an answer to that?
Will Wilson:
I think it was a, you know, it was intentionally provocative. It's always made me feel angry, uh, to hear this story that Indians were afraid of being, their souls were going to be stolen if they were photographed, right?
That there was this really. rudimentary misunderstanding of, of what photography is. And from my perspective, Indigenous cultures that were primarily like oral traditions, representation is incredibly important, and it's super nuanced, and it's, it's very much respected. And so when photography showed up and it was this incredibly descriptive, indexical way to represent something, of course, anybody who has a deep understanding of and respect for representation would be skeptical or suspicious of this technology.
What if Indians invented photography? I mean, I think it would be done with respect, like reciprocity would be an important part of that. That's why in the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, for example, I gift the sitter the original photographic object, the tintype of them, in exchange for a scan of it.
I also used that notion when I was working with a colleague, John Rohrbach, who was the Senior Curator of Photographs at the Eamon Carter Museum. He invited me to cocurate an exhibition, and we entitled it Speaking with Light. And it was a sort of a survey of contemporary Indigenous photography in the United States. But we used that notion of a powerful understanding and respect of representation as the guiding principle for the curation of that exhibition.
Lutz Koepnick:
It probably involves also an understanding of the camera or the photographic process as one that isn't extractive, right? I mean, there's so much writing, so much thinking about photography that emphasizes the capture, the kind of almost violent way of interrupting time. Photography is so often being described as being in and of itself an extractive medium. It's extracting an image. The way I understand this question, the search for a non-extractive way of doing photography.
Will Wilson:
I think that's a really beautiful way to put that. That's one answer to the question.
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Lutz Koepnick:
Will Wilson's Connecting the Dots was exhibited at Vanderbilt's Curb Center in fall 2024 as part of a much larger project centered around the question of eco-grief, those complex and often messy emotions many of us experience facing environmental degradation. As a multi-year collaboration between the Curb Center, the Science Communication Media Collaborative, and the Vanderbilt University Theatre Department, during its first year, the Eco-Grief initiative launched a visual art exhibition with the title Extraction / Interaction.
Next to Will Wilson's photographs, it featured the work of Eliza Evans and John Sabraw, the former using creative legal tools to derail fracking operations, the latter employing pigments made from toxins to create quite beautiful paintings. In addition to this, the initiative also commissioned a series of one act plays by four playwrights and staged them with student actors.
Daphne and Florence by Jenna Femia explored the loss of a tree felled for a development project. Christine Idazak's Blue Blood Red Knot revolved around the interdependence of human and more than human creatures. In Reynaldo Piniella's play Let Us Sit Upon the Ground, student protesters confronted the inflexibility of their college leadership in the face of the climate crisis. And in Waiting for Environment by Jemes Sanchez, four young individuals wrestled with different strategies to fight climate change while feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the crisis at hand. I talked to Leah Lowe, the Curb Center's faculty director, about the initiative in general and its theater component, before bringing Will Wilson back to the table to discuss how the notion of grief structures his own photographic practice.
Leah Lowe:
My name is Leah Lowe, and I am a professor of theater here at Vanderbilt. I'm also the director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, where we aim to elevate art as a form of inquiry, a way of understanding, and a celebration of the human spirit. What we're really interested in is advocating for art to be seen as a way in which folks ask questions, grapple with the truth, grapple with things that is parallel to the way that scholars dig into facts, interpretation to make arguments.
Good artists, interesting artists are always making arguments about the world that we find ourselves in. We're also really interested in interdisciplinarity here at the Curb Center. Art collaborating with other disciplines has a way of shedding light on those other disciplines. Art also addresses audiences very differently, because art is almost always a more holistic address to an audience that reaches for their hearts as well as their tiny brains.
That is maybe a little bit of a simplistic rendering of it, but I do think that other disciplines have a lot to learn from artists.
Lutz Koepnick:
It's a good lead towards the Eco-Grief initiative because it is a collaboration between the Curb Center, the Program in Communication Science and Technology on campus, and the Vanderbilt Theater Department.
In collaborations with the sciences, the arts are often just expected to kind of illustrate or communicate with scientists, but what you're trying to do here is really think of the arts as something that can provide new forms of inquiry, ask new questions.
Leah Lowe:
Yeah, yeah. I too have seen art in the service of science frequently, and I think that actually is really valid.
The scientists need the artists. There are all kinds of problems with the way that science communicates with its various audiences, right? And so art can be a really helpful way of illustrating scientific principles and findings. But that's not what we're trying to do here through the Eco Grief Initiative.
The Eco Grief Initiative was born out of a feeling that there are a lot of conversations about climate change that need to be happening. And a lot of them are not happening. And one of the reasons that they're not happening is out of anxiety and fear, particularly on the part of those who do not have the scientific expertise to engage in scientific conversations about climate change.
But we're all going to live through it. And I think that there are so many smart, interesting people who are not scientists who have profound experiences with the way that it is hotter each year, that when you drive your car on a country road, no bugs hit the windshields, you know, these are obvious, incontrovertible facts.
So, I wanted to think about using art to provide the impetus for conversations among those smart people who have feelings, who have noticed things about their environments, but are kind of shut out, of certain conversations where science pins itself as the authority.
Lutz Koepnick:
Eco grief seems to be a fairly open term. It might be about emotions like sorrow, guilt, terror, complicity. Yeah. All kinds of things might be involved, but the way I understand it, the plan for this eco grief initiative is really to take these emotions seriously. And sort of think we cannot address climate change today without taking them seriously.Whether we're a scientist, an engineer, or a regular citizen, we need art to kind of tap into them and make that happen.
Leah Lowe:
That's absolutely true, and it's kind of amazing how many climate plays are being developed, how many visual artists have turned to working with the earth in a kind of like, activist perspective, but that's exactly what it is. When I think about the emotional landscape of living through climate change, eco grief was the word that we used back when we conceived of this initiative. I'm not entirely certain we would use the same phrase now, because I think it really is about the totality of the emotional landscape of living through climate change.
So there's also rage like it could have been eco rage, or there is also a sense of love and humor. And a kind of desire to connect with communities of people as we go through this, that we have seen in the art that we've been working with.
Lutz Koepnick:
I must admit when I heard first eco grief, I thought that's a very fuzzy notion. But you really make a claim that this kind of grief, that this working through of the emotions, is one way towards activism. It isn't just licking our wounds about all the things that seem to fall apart around us.
Leah Lowe:
This is very, very much aimed at sparking conversation and through conversation action. And it's acknowledging people's lived experiences.
Lutz Koepnick:
This year you had some playwrights on campus. You have a photographer here at the Curb Center. We also have activists and painters. Describe a little bit how they, in your view, work through these kind of emotions to make climate grief happen and productive.
Leah Lowe:
There's two main focuses right now. One is the four short plays that we just produced in the theater department this fall.
And then this exhibition at the Curb Center. With the playwrights, we commissioned work from them. We put out a call, we got an amazing number of applications to be considered for a commission.
Lutz Koepnick:
That was a risky move, right? Having an open call, you probably received all kinds of responses.
Leah Lowe:. I mean, we received all kinds of stuff.
I've thought that we would maybe get 70 or 80 applications and we got over. 250. The number of applications we received is kind of indicative of the fact that this phrase hits a nerve. A lot of the playwrights who wrote to us said “eco grief, I've never heard of that term before, but it describes exactly how I feel, you know, when my house flooded in Florida, you know, when Hurricane Sandy hit Long Island.”
It was really important to me that the playwrights we chose talk to students because playwrights are always curious about who am I writing for and what is the community that I'm writing for. So we had some incredibly gracious colleagues who opened up their classes to allow the playwrights to zoom in.
We had students who wanted to talk to playwrights, sign up for slots, and talk to playwrights one on one. They all produced different plays, but
Lutz Koepnick:
Probably on very short notice.. They didn't have much time to develop these. right?
Leah Lowe:
No, but they were short works. We asked for them to be 45 minutes or less, and then during the fall semesters, they had meetings with folks, and then during the spring semester, they came in and we did readings of drafts.
One of our playwrights was interested in the way that supply chain disruption that occurred because of extreme weather events influenced. everyday lives. So she wrote a play about a young woman who needs medication that is not available because of Hurricane Eloise, right? Fictional hurricane. Um, and she ends up rescuing a horseshoe crab.
Horseshoe crabs are endangered because their blood, which is blue, is used for testing medical devices. So it became this very interesting play about how we believe we are alone and not connected as humans, but how connected we actually are. A secondary part of that play had to do with why do we want to save some species and not others.
Horseshoe crab eggs are the primary food for a cute little sandpiper called a red knot. And people want to save the red knots, but they're not so interested in saving the very weird horseshoe crabs. One of the plays that I was totally fascinated by looked at people who are on the same side, you know, that believe in climate change, believe it's caused by humans, believe it's a problem.
at the real conflicts that exist within that large community about what do we do now and exploring the conflicts that can exist among like minded people when we consider something like this and how we do have to find. Some agreement in order to move forward. So I was really impressed by like, just the differences of the place. The fact that many of them were really, really funny, which is of
Lutz Koepnick:
course, something that we often do not really allow in conversations about climate change, because there is a mandated seriousness. And I mean, for many good reasons, there's a mandated seriousness that we have to perform to actually do something, I don't want to say lighter, but do something on the lighter, looser side.
Leah Lowe:
It's not only that we expect the conversations to be serious, but we also expect them to be somewhat stuffy and not have kind of room for interchange, right? Because it's a scientific subject.
Lutz Koepnick: And that's coming back to that earlier conversation we had is maybe the particular prerogative of art to allow us to have a multiplicity of emotions that come out in these kind of processes. And that there can be also a sense of humor, there can be a rage that can be feeling overwhelmed by not being able to actually, or feeling that one is not being able to do anything.
Leah Lowe:
This sort of powerlessness. Powerlessness.
Lutz Koepnick:
And I love how you emphasize that we're not alone in this, although we often feel, and maybe climate grief precisely happens where we feel like we're alone.
Leah Lowe:
It does, you know, and I think that that's just one of the really pernicious things about American society. Like, we're not alone, and we can't be alone, and we have to figure out what we are going to do about this looming problem.
Lutz Koepnick:
So as far as these plays are concerned, it was a very collaborative process to get them finished in the first place, but then of course you also put them on stage with directors here from campus, and of course students also from campus.
Tell me about that. How did that work out?
Leah Lowe:
Our theater department, our technical director, Liz Haines, is someone who is very, very interested in sustainability and theatrical production. We vowed that we were going to use sustainable materials and methods in creating these plays, and so we reused scenery.
We used higher quality wood that was sustainably harvested when we did have to buy lumber. And we used just a lot of the detritus of other shows that we have lying around, which is an embarrassing amount, right? We have a lot of fabric, it turns out. It was theatrical upcycling, essentially. And I think that the students who worked on the projects also had a kind of understanding about why we were doing this.
With the students in the rehearsal room, we had a lot of discussion about the issues of each play, and we had a climate studies major in a leading role in one of them. The playwrights had spoken in climate studies classes, so I think people felt like they had a piece of themselves in these plays.
Lutz Koepnick:
It’s a big learning experience, not just for the audience being exposed to this, but also the students themselves.
Leah Lowe:
I think so. One of the things that doing something like this enables students to do is imagine. One of the primary ways, I think, that art works, right? That we, through art, are able to imagine other possibilities and have a more capacious sense of what's possible. So I think that is something that a lot of students got out of it.
Lutz Koepnick:
What holds all these pieces or projects together isthe word extraction, and I'm really curious about this notion. Extraction isn't just a physical, a material kind of practice where we approach land as a mere resource. It's also a mindset.. I wonder how, in your view, the art projects at the Curb Center, but also the theater plays, work against that. How do we overcome that kind of extractive mindset that is so at the heart, well, not just of our environmental problems, but maybe of most of our problems.
Leah Lowe:
Right, I mean, extraction is a real capitalist notion for me. It's taking something out and profiting from it. So what I love about this exhibit is I feel like the artist kind of turned the idea of extraction on its head by extracting from these unpromising materials, you know, these smart and intelligent and witty And I think with the plays, maybe it's a little different.
The plays, I think, are working, as theater almost always does, to put the sense of humanity back into the project, right? It operates on this very simple notion that what happens when we're all in the same room together and we're telling a story. The plays, collectively, even though they were very different, were really all trying to put the idea of humanity and collectivism and caring back into the equation.
Lutz Koepnick:
There's something in collaborative work when people with very different backgrounds have to very actively listen to each other, that we might be able to break some of these extractivist attitudes that are so ingrained in us.
Leah Lowe:
Theater is deep collaboration, and like, we're all trained to do it. So I think, I think it is important.
You know, scientists often work in that way too. We ask different people in different fields to write a brief note to each of the plays, right? So, uh, one of our colleagues, Larissa DeSantis, is an evolutionary biologist, and she's going to be writing the preface to the Blue Blood Red Knot play that deals with the horseshoe crabs.
I had everyone who was writing a preface attend a rehearsal as well as attending the performance because I really wanted them to get some sense of what was up. She was so great. She came to the play. She loved the play. She brought her teenage daughter to the rehearsal with her. And then she sent me this really nice e mail saying like, it's not 4.
7 million years. It's really more like six. She was like, I don't know how important this is to you, but if you want to be absolutely accurate, she very much appreciated seeing this discussion on the stage in a way that was going to affect people who are not the people that she teaches in her labs.
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Lutz Koepnick:
“Photography for me is about time travel,” Will Wilson once said in an interview. And he continued: “Its ability to indexically register the world as it arrests time and turns space into a transient narrative object that can be altered, manipulated, and transformed continually amazes me.” Will Wilson's images, in spite of their often painful subject matter, certainly amaze their viewers as well. The compositional rigor of these images, their almost abstract play with light lines, shapes, and colors, all endow them with a strong sense of urgency. They make us travel deep into the wounds and scars of the present. I was curious to hear more from both Leah and Will about the role of grief in these images and how they affect their viewers.
Leah Lowe:
I feel sadness and emptiness when I look at them. But I feel like the way that they come at me is a wake up. For me, these photographs, they don't make me like want to go away and weep. They make me want to do something. And I think part of it is that the attraction of the kind of other worldliness of the photos and then, then knowing that it is the site of an abandoned mine is really kind of creepy and spooky. These are pretty interesting pieces in thinking of what it is to live through climate change, right? The amazing contradictions, surprises, fears, anxieties, you know, but also just the sense of loss.
Will Wilson:
As you're describing them. I am thinking about the land as body and that these are wounds or their scabs or their scars that have to a certain extent healed. But they're still in this process of being remediated, or being reintegrated, or maybe it's like the people's relationships to the history of this scarring that's occurred that is still unfolding, and it's slow.The violence was slow, and the healing is gonna be slow.
Leah Lowe:
Do they ever really get remediated to the point where they chose no threat to anyone?
Will Wilson:
One of the things that is a real problem is livestock getting too down and eating contaminated vegetation because often these are sort of, uh, depressions in the landscape and they'll fill with water. Even people, like young people, when you're like out herding sheep in the desert and you're out of water and there's like a beautiful little pool of water over there, you're gonna drink it. But no one told you that used to be a uranium mine, you know, and that gets into your system. And it may take 20 years before the crazy cell division and mutation that engenders cancer happens.
It's a slow process, but a number of them have been remediated to an extent, but they've been capped in some ways, and as long as they're not disturbed, I don't think they pose a threat. But then there's the water. That's one thing that a number of these big sites are next to important water sources, and I don't really understand how they can keep those vectors of contamination from getting into the water, and the water is so important in that, you know, on the res, because it's so dry, and there's like 30 year drought.
Lutz Koepnick:
I really like how you speak about these sites as an animated body, a body that has been scarred. Doesn't this photographic work here really also emphasize that the landscape itself too, the land is grieving. It has been, it feels those emotions as well.
Will Wilson:
Ultimately, it's grieving for us and what we've done to the land, and I think it's worried about its children. The earth will go on. It's just, ultimately, we're doing this to ourselves.
Lutz Koepnick:
In spite of all the contamination, the land also has a form of resilience from which we can still learn something.
Will Wilson:
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's why the cartography, the mapping is so important. Cartography can bear witness to what's going on to make sure that people know that these places exist.
One of the things we were thinking about was having different layers of information associated with this app, like, like weather, like, is there a really bad windy day coming when you don't want to breathe the dust that flies off of this abandoned uranium mine that hasn't been capped? Because the majority of them have not been remediated. But in this grieving, there's also got to be some agency. There's got to be some awareness of the continued potential for harm associated with these places. We can grieve, but we also have to be aware, have some agency in relation to that. They're still toxic, you know. Grieving for me usually infers like an event in the past.
Lutz Koepnick:
I think it's important also that the images here, they're part of a work, but they're also part of a much larger project. You speak about the app, their networks of exchange. These images have all kinds of afterlives as well, where they become part of a, of a politics and activist possibilities as well.
Will Wilson:
For sure, I'm not the only person doing this too.There are a number of initiatives that are, , focused on this. There's a lot of activists who've worked for years around these issues. Probably the most important cohort were the wives who survived the deaths of the miners and lobbied to get some form of recognition and reparation for, for what happened.
Lutz Koepnick:
What's your hope when you see this work shown here thousands of miles away from Mexican Hat and other dump sites and you see students here engaging with this kind of work?
Will Wilson:
It's really exciting to me to see that people are interested and potentially it could serve as a model for other initiatives. I think artists have a like a really cool capacity to think through and imagine solutions to really complex problems. And if there's a way that this work can inspire, you know, young people to follow that, that notion, then, then I'm excited.
Leah Lowe:
And do you think that having students in proximity to this kind of work does spark connections? We don't necessarily, when we're viewing something, think through it linearly. Maybe it'll help people think about things in their own areas. I grew up not far from here, in a little university town that is right next to a coal mine town, where all the different horrible ways that people figured out how to get coal out of the ground, all of them practiced there. Hearing you say that made me think like, oh right, you know, there is actually something in my own experience. That is similarly terrifying and it takes a really long time. It's generational. So I think getting students to kind of connect to thinking about problems that they may not have actually encountered physically, they may not have seen, but they're, it's connected, right?
Lutz Koepnick:
I think that beauty and the, the power of the project is really about making things that are often hidden, that were not known visible. Now, yes, we know these sites exist, but we hardly ever encounter them, or it's really hard to encounter them in the first place because they're stacked away.
Leah Lowe:
One of the things that's complicated about environmental changes and degradation is to realize that you are embedded in a kind of network of fossil fuel use. You can't just say, no, I don't want to do this. That's something that wants to be seen outright and to think about that we enjoy a kind of life that is made possible by other folks leading other people's lives. You know, it's really scary, you know, I mean, I am an optimist, I do want to say that.
Lutz Koepnick:
Looking at the project, it seems to me that there is a lesson to be learned from the land itself. If we acknowledge that the land is grieving, the land suffers, the land feels the pain that colonialism has done to it, and extraction has done to it. It will come back at some point, it will be remediated, maybe not in our timescale, maybe in much longer time, but it will. We just need to change our own timescales sometimes as well in order to understand.
Leah Lowe:
And I think we need to think, we need to think about the future in our way when we think about climate change because there's short sightedness and there's short sightedness, right? We have to think into the future. And the way that decisions that we make, you know, echo out into the future.
Lutz Koepnick:
Leah said she's an optimist. She's hopeful. How about you, Will?
Will Wilson:
I think ultimately I am an optimist, just because that's sort of the nature of, you know, who I am. As you guys were talking, I was just thinking about what this very selfishly enables me. To roam these landscapes that are incredibly beautiful and be out there reconnecting with these spaces.
I often go get to hang out with my family when I'm doing these research trips. Half the time I'm sleeping in the back of my truck, like, trying to locate these different sites. But then I'll go into town and get to hang out and catch up with relatives and reconnect.
Leah Lowe:
So often we think of ourselves as these like individual beings with these lives, but when you start thinking about climate, I think it's really hard to not notice how impacted we all are.
Lutz Koepnick:
Yeah, I wouldn't call that at all selfish. I think it's not selfish at all. I think what we, what we see is really that the photographic process here is, well, it is about making images, but part of that process is also really connecting, connecting with the land in new ways or in old ways as well, but also connecting with communities and connecting communities with those images.
One of the biggest problems of extractivist culture is that it overlooks the extent to which we're all entangled with the land. It also overlooks how we as humans are entangled with each other and forces us to be these individuals. And I think emphasizing the connectivity that comes out of this project with the images, through the images, is a powerful statement against this extractivist syndrome that isn't just about the land, it's really also a mindset. You know, and I think you already work against that.
Leah Lowe:
There's joy in this work, too, right? A lot of this work comes from a place of, once you get into it, I mean, it's exciting, it's interesting. There's a little bit of a contradiction if I'm dealing with something that's actually really heavy, but as artists, what we need to be doing is doing the stuff that sparks that, you know, creative juice.
Lutz Koepnick:
I mean, art needs a certain sense of playfulness. Otherwise it's not going to work. Let me thank you. Yeah, well, thank you. Thanks for sharing your work here and making this work available and thanks for spending time this afternoon here and having this wonderful conversation.
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Lutz Koepnick:
The most common isotope of uranium has a half-life of 4. 47 billion years. Uranium for this reason plays an important role in reconstructing the history of early Earth. Photographs, on the other hand, are set to freeze time and convert the present into some unknown future's past. Will Wilson's images, however, are much more than mere slices through time, mere archives of human made destruction. They address our present itself, urge us to address the durations of planetary history. But also what we need to do today to ensure our future actually has a future. These images have no half-life. They instead speak to their viewers in the name of life, the ongoing life of the land, and the people who live on and live with the land.
Thank you for listening to this special edition of Art of Interference, recorded and produced at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. For images, links, and more information related to this or any of our other programs, Please visit artofinterference.com and please visit Will Wilson's website at willwilson.photoshelter.com for more information about his work. And www. vanderbilt.edu/ curbcenter to learn more about the Curb Center and its ongoing eco grief initiative.