Mel Chin, The Arctic Is…
The Arctic Is…
The Arctic Is delivers an urgent message from Inuit hunter Jens Danielsen to the world. It was filmed in Paris during the monumental climate talks in 2015 and right after the devastating attacks in the city that are only a harbinger of the chaos to come … unless we act.
Jens tells us that the extreme changes in climate he is seeing now will affect people around the world as clearly as the Inuit culture of northern Greenland. We are not separate; we are connected. The Arctic is Paris. The Arctic is Des Moines. The Arctic is Nairobi. The Arctic is Beijing. The Arctic is Aleppo. The Arctic is ____ your town.
Chin will also offer thoughts on “Hot Topics and Cold Climates” regarding the effectiveness of the progressive transmission of ideas in the realm of polarized political reality.
Mel Chin is a pioneering Conceptual artist, with an expertise in art-science collaborations among other projects. Chin is known for his site-remediation artwork Revival Field (1991-ongoing) in which he worked with geochemist, Dr. Rufus Chaney to prove the existence of hyperaccumulators, plants that extract heavy metals from the soil. The work is notable for its aesthetic terms and for producing empirical evidence of the hyperaccumulation process. The results of the artwork/experiment were published in peer-reviewed science journals, including Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The ecological orientation of his practice continues in his longstanding project, The Arctic is Paris first undertaken for the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference.
At the Moraine 