Join us as we close our exhibit “Displaced,” an art installation for climate justice. We’d like to offer a platform for students, faculty, and community to come together and reflect on the impacts of climate change on displacement, to speak, share stories, discuss change, and foster deeper understanding. At the end of the conversation, attendees can take a piece of the installation home. There will be snacks!
We hope you join us on Friday, April 13th at 3 pm on the lawn on the Women’s Building Lawn in front of Lab Sciences.
Rain Location: Women’s Building Dance Studio 2
More information on our art installation, which will be up for the week prior:
“Displaced: An Art Installation for Climate Justice” is a visual representation of the number of people displaced by climate disasters each year. We wanted to emphasize the anthropogenic ties that amplify these catastrophic climate disasters. Each of the 215 miniature “homes,” made from cement and coal fly ash, represents 100,000 people displaced each year for the 21.5 million total (according to the UN). We hope to educate and raise awareness about 2017’s storms, floods, mudslides, droughts, famines, and fires – some of the worst in history – and the people whose lives were changed as a result. We wanted to make the connection between daily activities using energy and coal burned in St. Louis and St. Louis County that impact global climate and the displacement of people in coastal cities and island nations in the United States and abroad. This is just one of the many ways in which climate change is a social justice issue, but we hope to call attention to climate displacement in particular through this installation.
The installation was completed by Kristen Patino and Julia Widmann with support from Fossil Free Wash U and funding from Student Sustainability Board.
More information on our prior programming:
On Wednesday, March 28th, at 8:30 pm, we co-hosted a movie screening with Green Action and Environmental Studies to help paint our installation and show two short films: first, Thirty Million about the Bangladeshis who will be displaced by rising sea-levels, and second, Fossil Free WashU’s short 6 minute video from their visits to local Peabody coal mines in Southern Illinois.
Link here: https://www.youtube.com/