Dr. Ana M. Ochoa Gautier, ethnomusicologist & Hannah Chalew, visual artist will present a short talk on their research and then have a conversation around the shared themes on extraction and port cities found in their work.
Ana M. Ochoa Gautier will present her research titled, “Caribbean Port Cities and Oceanic Auralities”, which investigates how between the 1930s and 1991 oceanographers in the United States and the U.S. Navy developed underwater listening devices in the waters of the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the East and West coast of the United States and Canada. This talk explores the role of these devices in redefining the Caribbean region through a subaquatic sonic extractivism vital to the development of a media underwater infrastructure in the region.
Hannah Chalew will present on her work, “Orphan Well Gamma Gardens”, her recent mixed-media installation that repurposes salvaged oil and gas wellheads into fountains supporting native aquatic plants, reflecting on the afterlife of extractive industries in Southern Louisiana and beyond. Chalew will discuss her research on the region’s history of exploitation and extraction from plantation to petrochemical, the risks of carbon capture and abandoned fossil-fuel infrastructure, and the ways fossil-fuel companies use art-washing to distract from environmental harm.
