The Body + The Land: Bioregional Belonging at the Albany Bulb

This spring, in partnership with Invisible International and Climate Creative, we kicked off a collaborative community-based research project exploring how were we live shapes our health. The Body + The Land project recognizes the connections between people, animals, plants, and a shared environment.*

The project hopes to surface and gather community knowledge that can be used by local organizations to shape local health initiatives. Over the next year we will be exploring how Bay Area residents see how where they live—the hills they walk daily, the commutes they undertake, the atmospheric rivers they weather, the gardens they grow—is shaping their health.

For the research project kick-off I developed a site-specific, kid-friendly photo walk to facilitate new encounters—with pollinators! with the bright superbloom!—between visitors and the Albany Bulb.

The Body

+ The Land Photo Walk

an invitation to explore the Albany Bulb

The kick-off party was an opportunity chance to gather input and engage the Bulb communally, but we will be working all year long, inviting community members to call in to leave their observations at (510) 519-1506. If you are local to the Bay Area, you can participate, too. Call in to leave your observations about how where we live is shaping your health.

*framework: One Health

billy mark: 37.45°N 122.17°W

Offering was born from what artist Billy Mark had begun calling, in phone conversations between Detroit and San Francisco, the low-down surveillance blues.

Our collaboration eventually bloomed into an interactive storytelling project and a book, but it started as a series of questions Billy was asking about what it felt like to be traced and tracked and monitored and to have what is known about us monetized by, among others, Google.

Composer Jon Armstrong, and I joined Billy for this collaboration, using a soundwalk app to map seven of Jon's compositions to seven sites around Google's headquarters in Mountainview, Ca.

Billy and I spent a day traveling clockwise around the Googleplex perimeter, seeing and being seen, in a kind of contemplative migration.

We moved from site to site, in the grooves of older rhythms of contemplation: 5 am, 7 am, 9 am, noon, 3 pm, 5 pm, and finally 7 pm.

Using an iPhone and a handheld speaker, Jon’s compositions were triggered whenever we arrived at a new site on the soundmap. Billy’s performance in each specific location wove together the sounds, our inquiry, and specific place we occupied.

For me, working with Billy and Jon to create Offering meant asking what photographs might become in conversation with music and movement.

What if I embraced the limitations of a particularly dark hour and let the representation go subtle and unfocused?

What if the combination of music and movement made me look away from Billy and toward something else?

What if—as happened during the making of the imagery at 3pm, I made images while being misconstrued by bystanders as a woman photographing a body she had found floating in Kaiser Creek instead of attempting to call out for help rescuing it?

Offering, is an story of our particular encounter, and the soundmap remains live—an invitation, as Billy says—for anyone who gets overcome by those low-down surveillance blues.

Sound + Color: in Dakar, Senegal

In Senegal, we soaked in the sun, the music, and the beautiful vibes under Baobab trees, in market places, on boats out on Lac Rose.

We painted with bright watercolors in the slant light while our loved ones drummed late into the afternoon.

We danced in celebration of a New Year and renewed love. We threw our arms around old friends and carried new babies on our hips. We shook off the slumber and constrictions of isolated pandemic years and shared community plates as our bent knees touched other bent knees and our laughter spilled down from the rooftop onto the streets of Dakar.

Roma, Texas: Location Scouting in the RGV

I scouted a series of locations with award-winning filmmaker, Daniel García ahead of his next film project.

We spent our week in the Rio Grande Valley interviewing locals and engaging the semi-permeable border and the multiple ways it might be crossed.

Campus Embrace: USF Magazine

The University of San Francisco looks for new ways to listen as students speak candidly on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We connected with students and professors to hear what they want in a campus learning to better respond to the voices of the students it serves, to dialogue through tough observations, and to stretch toward a more robustly supportive academic environment. Portraits published in USF Magazine in support of interviews.

Ambos Nogales: A City Bisected

Ambos Nogales began as photo-illustrated field notes and ultimately garnered praise as a San Francisco Press Club Award winner. The piece describes learnings encountered during an immersion trip on the US–Mexico Border.

Post-Apartheid Justice: Sam Meadows + the Public Defenders

Sam Meadows assisted in the establishment of a Criminal/Juvenile Law Clinic at the University of the West Cape in South Africa, returning in 1998 and 2002 to assist in the establishment of a pilot public defender system. We were honored to have the chance to catch up with the former Professor Emeritus between advising sessions with the law students who look to her for advice about how best to navigate next steps.

See our collaboration in the pages of USF Lawyer Magazine.

East Bay Glitterati: Fashion as a Force of Good

BIG IDEA: Christena Reinhard's love of fashion pairs powerfully with her desire to fund nonprofit organizations compassionately shaping their communities.

CHALLENGE: The only challenge inherent to connecting with Christena is getting her to stand still. We punted on the stillness, opting instead to run alongside her as she showed us around her warehouse studio. On site she accepts high-end pieces and resells them to fund donor-selected partner charities or choose any 501c3 non-profit big or small.

Among the Stars: A Cosmology of Delight

San Francisco Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Aparna Venkatesan, studies the first stars and quasars in the universe, cosmological reionization, the physical conditions in early-universe galaxies, and cosmological element synthesis.

Along with the early stars and quasars, Aparna lectures on various cultural understandings of the heavens, so for her session we comingled textures and lighting varieties to reflect the breadth of her interest. We made photographs in her lab, surrounded by models of the universe she explores.

La Vita Floreale: A Stylist's Novel Ideas for Botanical Accoutrement

Long Beach stylist and florist Inessa Nichols Designs dreams of masculine floral pairings—reviving 19th Century ideas about the potential of gentlemen and flowers. 

We wanted to push against gendered ideas of colors and florals and come away with an inspiring collection of possibilities for imaginative floral usage.