Envisioning environments    (2013-present)



Sensing and showing climate change   

Research
Making
Writing
Teaching

(2017-present)

The effects of climate change are now all too tangible. And yet the dynamics of climate change are difficult to understand or imagine, let alone feel. How can people better grasp movements of carbon and processes of global warming that are taking place all around, every day? This multimodal project makes interrelations of carbon, air, and earth perceptible to bodies, eyes, and hands: helping to make climate change dynamics more actionable at immediate scales.

This work is partly engaged through a multimedia art project, Unruly Earths. It also involves writing, teaching, and research (described below) on holding carbon in urban soils, and on sensibilizing environmental phenomena that are very large and very slow.

Photograph of sediment model, unruly earths landscape representation study, Margot Lystra.
Supported by:
Urban Soils Institute
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
University of Montreal
University at Buffalo Center for Pedagogy
Design drawing by Romain Gizzi, Amélie Longpré, and Bénédicte Simard, studio work, University of Montreal, 2021.

Works...

in process
Divining Carbon
is a multimedia exhibition which reimagines the carbon cycle by transposing scientific information into a series of embodied visions and personal stories. In resonance with the kinesthetic, intuitive practice of water divining, the works in this exhibition seek, locate, and embody an abundant yet mostly unseeable substance whose circulation through air and land is crucially important to life on earth. (Exhibition proposals will be made available beginning fall 2023.)

artwork
Unruly Earths (see page linked here)


presentation
“Science and Magic, Carbon and Soil,” opening session, Layered Histories, Emergent Horizons - Urban Soils Institute Symopsium, online (October 2021).

artist in residence
Urban Soil Institute Art Extension Service / Swale Lab, New York, NY
(October 2021).



Teaching

guest lectures
“Situating Soil,” Climate by Design, Professors David Moreno Mateos, Martha Schwartz, Jill Desimini, Department of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design (2021, 2020).

studio

“Cultivating Soil, Situating Climate: Urban Strategies and Designs” Graduate studio in Landscape Architecture, University of Montreal (2020).


lecture course
“Discovering Landscape,” Environmental Studies Program / Department of Architecture, University at Buffalo (2019).


studio
“Culturing the Soil City: Re-Envisioning Carbon, Waste, and Climate, Site to Planet,” Graduate studio in Landscape Architecture, Cornell University (2017).



Research

conference session
“Climate, Environment, and Control: Challenging Narratives and Norms,” organized and co-chaired with Erin Putalik, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA (March 2019).

presentation
“Mediating Climate through Everyday Design?” Our Everyday Planet Seminar, convened by Melissa Ragain and Lily Woodruff. The Assosciation for the Study of the Arts of the Present Annual Conference, Oakland, CA (October 2017).





Watercolor from Walter L. Kubiëna, The soils of Europe: illustrated diagnosis and sistematics. Consejo superior de investigaciones cientificas (T. Murby, 1953).



Photograph of sediment model, unruly earths landscape representation study, Margot Lystra.



Conceptual soil section by Guillaume Archambault-Lelièvre, Ekaterina Frank, and Maude Ouellet, studio work, University of Montreal, 2021.