About
“What is the emotional experience of an unseasonably warm day? What changes have you noticed in your local landscapes or weather patterns? When you think about the climate crisis, what do you think about and how do you feel? “
According to NASA and NOAA, the top ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 2010. How is this global warming registering on the level of the individual? How do we notice change, and how does it feel to notice? What does change feel like?
The Warmest Years on Record: An Oral History (2018-ongoing) is an oral history project that collects audio recorded interviews investigating the sensorial, emotional, and psychological effects of living in climate crisis. Across New York City and State I am meeting with people to talk about what it feels like to live through this moment of transition.
These conversations serve as both an archive for the future, and a way to build language in the present around this unprecedented moment - a model for how we can productively talk about the personal experience of the climate changing around us.
I invite you to spend some time listening to these conversations, and I hope they spark in you a way to frame and contextualize your own observations, hopes and fears for a present and a future in the midst of profound transition.
Past interview sites and partnerships have been through GreenThumb, The History Center in Tompkins County in Ithaca, NY, Nut Island Creative Colony on Governor’s Island, and the Information Commons at the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch.
This is an ongoing project and I am always looking for more folks to talk with. If you are an individual interested in participating or an organization interested in partnering, please get in touch.
About the Artist
Rachel Garber Cole (b. 1985, Boston, MA) is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist who works across performance, video, sound, text and social engagement. With a background in theater, her practice is deeply influenced by character-based storytelling, which she uses to create worlds that explore the intersection of intimate feeling and public politics. Recent work investigates the affective, perceptual, and psychological effects of climate crisis, seeking to build shared vocabularies that help articulate the experiences of living through this moment of transition.
Rachel received a BA in Theater Arts from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN in 2007. Recent exhibitions include La Bodega Gallery, Women Made Gallery, C24 Gallery, The Florida Review Online, Aggregate Space Gallery, Flex Fest, Field Projects, Present Company, NARS Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, Queens World Film Festival,Festival L’Inconnu, Bushwick Film Festival, Blue Stockings Film Screenings, and Grrl Haus Cinema. Rachel hosts a monthly Bring Your Own Film film/video open mic in Brooklyn. She is a recipient of Brooklyn Arts Council’s Community Arts Fund, and Brooklyn Arts Council’s Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide (SPARC) Grant, and has been granted residencies at Prairie Center of the Arts, The Studios of Key West, Crosshatch’s Hill House Artist Residency, The Ucross Foundation, NARS International Residency Program, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the History Center in Tompkins County. Rachel will be presenting her ongoing oral history project, “The Warmest Years on Record,” at the Oral History Association’s Annual Conference in October 2020.