Fish Story

Fish Story (2013) emerged out of a series of discursive webcasts initiated by Rahmani in 2010, to Gulf to Gulf . Fish Story was a participatory public art project about how the lives of fish in the Mississippi River reflect human challenges in the Anthropocene era. Fish Story events included bringing people together to embody and take the roles of different agents of change for a game about an ecosystem, including the roles of habitat, politicians, pollution, and racism, to invite new perceptions on causal effects. The project resulted in a deepened study of finding the “trigger point” where pollution flowing into the water system from Memphis to the eutrophying Gulf of Mexico might be mitigated.

The project applies Aviva Rahmani’s Trigger Point Theory to the bioregion of the Mississippi Water Basin from base in Memphis. The Gulf to Gulf team (Aviva Rahmani; Dr. Eugene Turner, LSU; and Dr. Jim White, UCB) was invited to create this project for Memphis Social by curator Tom McGlynn, cofounder of Beautiful Fields, which was awarded the domestic 2013 franchise support grant from apexart to produce Memphis Social.

The Gulf to Gulf team collaborated to show synergy between environmental factors, including climate change, affecting indicator species of fish in the Mississippi, in the vicinity of Memphis. Many people are not aware that fish are affected by all the same factors causing disruptive drought, storms, temperature extremes, and flooding worldwide that impact people. The team chose Memphis as a critical point between factory farms upstream and dead zones downstream in the Gulf of Mexico, affecting the survival of fish. Dr. Turner noted the “trigger point” for healing dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico is Iowa, because it's at the center of Midwestern factory farms releasing nitrogen into the water system flowing into the gulf. The goal of Fish Story was a series of events to support local and regional conservation and enhance restoration science. Fish Story's progress was tracked on Rahmani's blog, Pushing Rocks, in 100 posts. An outcome of this project was the rough mathematical calculation by Dr. White, based on what we knew in 2013, that if the Earth could be re-greened by 36 percent, we might mitigate climate change. More information can be found on the Gulf to Gulf website.