Bellow Forth

LINK to project website where you can find much more about the project

about

Bellow Forth (2023-ongoing) is a community, eco-social art project focused on restor(y)ing* soil health and ecosystem resilience through ecological art, storytelling, community collaboration, education, and ecosystem soil science in wildfire-impacted lands/communities in northern New Mexico. This project addresses essential ecosystem regeneration necessitated by the 2022 Calf Canyon and Hermit’s Peak fires, the largest wildfires in New Mexico’s state history. The super-hot fires burned nearly 350,000 acres throughout the traditional homelands of Tewa and Jicarilla Apache Peoples, historical Land Grant communities, ranches, farmlands, homes, and mixed conifer and deciduous forest systems. The complexities of these histories, combined with three distinct waves of settler colonialism in our territory, requires emplaced and community-led responses towards contemporary environmental restoration efforts. Further, the environmental impacts from the fires are significant and will be long lasting, demanding considerate and novel recovery efforts. Bellow Forth ideates and practices alternative solutions to ecosystem repair guided by our ethos of restor(y)ing; this term is not as a word, or a symbol, it is a strategy—wherein cultural practices of meaning-making (storying) are symmetrical to and inseparable from ecosystem health and multispecies wellbeing. Diverse community stories and memories of place are the nutrients and nucleus of this project, feeding the scientific experimentation and steering its aesthetic development.

* We use the term restor(y)ing, rather than restoring to emphasize the importance and need for (counter narrative) storytelling within the climate crisis. It is increasingly evident that the stories framing dominant western onto-epistemologies are harmful, problematic, and must adapt as we do. Repairing/reframing stories is an essential tool for both environmental and community restoration.

Through transdisciplinary practice Bellow Forth centers community engagement and participation and fosters the expansion of ecological art practices with theory/practice grounded in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and the growth of situated, regenerative, creative practices. By refusing to reinforce systems of harm dominant within western scientific ecosystem science, Bellow Forth carries potential to establish precedence for Indigenous-led and community-centered ecosystem science along with building long-term capacity for climate-adaptive ecologies. We ask questions like, who does the science serve? How is the community involved? Whose land is being manipulated and have those Peoples or beings been consulted? Are their needs prioritized? Bellow Forth provides substantial opportunity to practice these questions, consider and apply their answers, and visually demonstrate why listening, caring, and prioritizing relationality must be taken seriously with/in the exigencies of the climate crisis.