Event overview
Screening of Modelling Kivalina, followed by discussion with Daniel Fernández Pascual, Hannah Meszaros Martin and Alon Schwabe, members of the Modelling Kivalina working group Part of the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy film screening series
Modelling Kivalina
(Andrea Bagnato, Daniel Fernández Pascual, Helene Kazan, Hannah Meszaros Martin, Alon Schwabe)
Project statement
Barrier islands like Kivalina run parallel to the coastline; and the coastal currents, which carry in and strip away sediment, determine the island’s movement in relation to the shore, which is itself in movement. Barrier island formation relies on consistent ocean levels to maintain the sediment deposits necessary for the island’s growth. Once formed, they provide a buffer for the coast, mitigating the potential harm caused by waves and storm surges.
Before they were forced to settle there in 1905, Iñupiaq people used the island of Kivalina as a summer encampment. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) built the Kivalina school and threatened the seasonal residents with imprisonment if they did not enroll their children. This process sought assimilation through education and was designed to immobilize native communities by eradicating their traditional migration patterns, and thus their culture. With the arrival of the school, the once migratory residents became static on a migrating island. Their territory, a vast open use landscape, was suddenly constrained into an enclosed grid of property lines.
The Kivalina school stands on the ocean’s edge on the southern tip of the island. In autumn, storms blow in from the southwest, bringing in fierce ocean swells, which in turn shift the coastline. In 2006, the United States Army Corps of Engineers produced a report that concluded that the island’s eroding shoreline, accelerated by the effects of climate change, posed an imminent threat to the existence of the entire village. According to their projections of future shorelines, the school would be the first structure to fall into the sea. The report concluded that the shoreline was eroding at an accelerated rate due to a lack of sea ice during the autumn storms, which in the past had protected the island against waves and storm surges. The lack of sea ice could be attributed to a warming earth, a changing climate.
The conclusion that climate change was accelerating the shoreline’s erosion led the residents of Kivalina to file a lawsuit against twenty-three of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, accusing them of contributing to climate change through the emission of greenhouse gases, and thus to the loss of their natural environment. In the case, the petitioners struggled to establish direct causal chains of responsibility due to the fact that, by nature, climate change is a distributed and complex process, spanning the whole width, depth, and molecular structure of the earth, sea, and sky. As such, this case raised urgent questions concerning legal accountability in a world where climate change is exacerbating existing inequities and contributing to an increasing number of displaced peoples and cultures. Against this backdrop, we, Modelling Kivalina, propose that the island of Kivalina be understood as a model on various levels—a microcosm of the world reorganized under a new climate regime.
http://thecentreoftheearth.org
https://www.facebook.com/ModellingKivalina
Background reading: Modelling Kivalina (Andrea Bagnato, Helene Kazan, Hannah Meszaros Martin, Daniel Fernández Pascual, Alon Schwabe), “The Coming Storm and the Changing Shoreline of Kivalina,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014), pp. 700–11
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Feb 2015 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
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