Drivers

Drivers

Public Space One
229 N. Gilbert St., Iowa City, IA 52245
May 13 – June 4, 2022

How do infrastructure, culture, and climate change connect? 

Drivers refers to the causes of climate change, and maps systems of dirty power through installation, video, and a collaboratively created diagram of ethanol-related objects. 

A drawn web of harmful energy networks includes the natural gas heating my home in Iowa City from western Texas, the nitrates from Iowan agriculture running down the Mississippi to the Louisiana and Texas coasts, and proposed carbon capture pipeline routes. An updated map shows how climate change enables new pipelines in the unfrozen north, and where oil and gas infrastructure is cut off in and around Ukraine, a crossroad between east and west. A stocking cap bearing a trademark, a bumper sticker made by prisoners, football, and traditions of land inheritance all link through ethanol’s political, economic, environmental, and cultural dimensions in a diagram derived from the collaborative workshop “Writing the Ethanol Implosion”, held at PS1 in March 2022.

The video capturing drivers as they pass by my home (here in Iowa City on Governor Street), is intended to be a series of sympathetic portraits taken as we relentlessly drive ourselves into a warmer climate, and the image on the postcard is of myself.

My intent is to trace networks that support my dirty power. The point is to reveal the things we don’t think about, that have been in front of us all along.