AM BODy

PROJECT SUBTITLE

Christen Oakes

Joseph Dahmen

Your generation has been brought to its knees by climate change.It hovers heavy over you, an experience of grief occurring for untold ecological losses over incomprehensible spatial and temporal scales.

A Vancouver Island cutblock: a place of devastation and resilience. How do you begin to understand a site which resides in the center of your grief?

What if, instead of drawing this site, you walk it? What might happen if you mapped it not with a pencil or with a computer, but with your body?

Walk from the lowest edge to the highest point in shorts and a tank top. Pull a cutblock bouquet with your bare hands. Over the course of a week, document the injuries to your legs and the fading bouquet(1:2,500).

Walk to the highest point on site. Tattoo a dot on your wrist for every visible cutblock. Walk to a distant cutblock and repeat the ritual.Line up the dots of the two visited sites over your pulse (1:25,000).

With a companion, bathe in the stream at site. Walk downstream until you find the ocean and bathe there, too (1:100,000).

mendieta
SITE AERIAL
ground
legs
fading bouquet
TATTOO MAP ON WRIST
wave
walking
CHRISTEN OAKES AND BENJI EISENBERG WALK INTO THE OCEAN