@pretty_fucked_art
“Beings Over Borders” The photograph was taken in May 2022 and is of a newly emerged Monarch I grew in my own 4x6ft garden. The monarch butterfly is a small creature who makes an annual journey of 3,000 miles across the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The Monarch subject of the digital art piece is adorned with a “Monarch Watch” tag referencing the Monarch Watch citizen science project founded in 1992 by the University of Kansas. The project’s purpose is to further Monarch conservation efforts by tracking migration routes, maintaining record of population dynamics, and promoting protection and restoration of critical habitats along the migration routes. To quote Monarch Watch’s vision statement, “…It is clear that the preservation of the monarch migration will require stewardship by the governments and private citizens of all three countries. We must all work together to create, conserve, and protect monarch habitats.” Over its lifespan the Monarch Watch effort has directly increased the population by empowering citizens to create thousands of monarch waystations, and through the distribution of over 1 million native milkweed starters.”
The style of Beings Over Borders is inspired by graffiti: illegal street art. In the piece, the Monarch Watch moniker takes on a dual meaning, implicating every citizen’s duty to witness and hold accountable the actions of fascist and authoritarian actors. The tag is encoded with an 1A27Z cipher that reads “MELT ICE,” as a nod to the necessity of covert language in the rhetoric of resistance.
My biggest hope for this piece is that it inspires its viewers to get curious about citizen science and mutual aid initiatives in their own spaces. There are so many ways anyone can get involved and as the success of the Monarch Watch project, individuals can and do save species. Resistance is war, but resistance is also letting love guide. Plant the milkweed. Take the picture. Make your art. Learn about plant blindness, and relearn to see the nature around you. These skills will not only bring color and life back into your vision, but also transfer over to how you see and experience your people.
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My family arrived through Ellis Island from Sicily in the 2nd great wave of immigrants in 1911 fleeing poverty and political instability. My great-grandmother landed first in Chicago’s Little Hell. After losing her first child to Spanish Influenza (which wasn’t Spanish at all, but an All-American illness), she and my great-grandfather moved permanently to strawberry country in Southern Louisiana.
To be honest, it’s not a happy story. We are a family fractured by the generational traumas associated with war, poverty, child marriage, abuse, addiction, and other things people aren’t supposed to talk about. Most of what any of us know was found through genealogical research as bits and pieces of us longed for an understanding of where we came from, while knowing we wouldn’t find healing in the people who hurt us.
I see home as something we build for ourselves, and tradition as what we choose to keep from what was given to us. I don’t have any physical tokens from my ancestors, and what I know of them mostly comes from late nights in library hosted online databases. What I do have is a deep sense of stewardship towards the land and its beings that was given to me by my mother, given to her by my grandmother, and that I can only assume was given to her by my great-grandmother. My ancestors were farmers who refused to sell their land to loggers. I am a gardener and certified naturalist. That through-line is my inheritance and it is my lifeblood.
When do you feel the pull between your present life and your roots the strongest, and how do you reconcile those competing feelings?
This is a difficult question to pull apart, because the answer is just “When I am.” There’s a constant undercurrent of feeling proud of what my family has survived so that I can be me, but also the knowledge that I am not anything they would have approved of me being.
My hope is fueled by all of the times I’ve witnessed acts of joy grow into larger gardens across space and time. Pictures taken as afterthoughts become evidence of new species. Plant trimmings given as tokens rather than trashed, become fascinations for new growers. Words spoken in encouragement instill the confidence to try. Trying becomes falling in love with the process, and being in love becomes encouraging another to try. Life begets life. Love begets love.