Sunk Shore is a collaboration between artist/microbiologist Clarinda Mac Low and dancer/historical marine ecologist Carolyn Hall. It is built to make the climate emergency concrete and personal--a walking tour of the future, tailor-made to specific sites; an interactive speculative fiction based on predictive climate change data. The “tour” uses imagination, sensory exercises, surrounding structures and landscapes, and evocative props to make abstract information viscerally present.
Since 2017, we have created multiple versions of Sunk Shore as walks, installations, videos and more. See documentation of all Sunk Shore versions here.
Sunk Shore is a passionately pragmatic response to the climate emergency. Through the power of imaginative - and enjoyable! - embodied experience, it seeks to make the facts of climate change, typically hard to absorb, present in the body. Sunk Shore brings the past into the present to evoke the future, partnering with local experts and activists to get a complete picture of how each “shore” has functioned, is functioning, and might change. The past, including the physical configuration of a waterway as well as the varied cultures around it, serves as fodder for an invented future. Our approach is hyperlocal and we build tours based on specific waterways and the surrounding communities and ecologies.
We want Sunk Shore to be a jumping-off point for discussions of the questions posed by anthropogenic climate change, inviting audiences into committed, holistic activism.
SUNK SHORE WORKSHOPS
We teach Sunk Shore workshops to bring participants together to share and explore practices that merge art and storytelling with the science of our natural urban ecologies, climate change data and impacts, and to envision the futures we would like to create.
The structure of the workshop is based on Sunk Shore's methodologies, a sharing of local knowldege and experience, and a series of exercises to embody those approaches and inspire speculative futures for the participants who live where where the workshop take place.
One such workshop: "What is Sunk Shore? Embodying Ecological Futures through Movement and Play" took place at Workshop Foundation and at the shore of the Danube River March 27 & 28, 2024 in Budapest, Hungary.
If you would like a taste of what our workshops are like, follow this link to see our storymap of this two-day Budapest workshop.
