Pushing Rocks

Going to Glasgow
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Going to Glasgow

I think this is our last year to have a hope of surviving climate change, and even many, many of us are already casualties, as are so many other species.

Everyone I know has the COP26 Glasgow on their minds, even though the consensus is that fossil fuel corporations have a stranglehold on governmental outcomes which could reverse or even halt the worst of the ecological damage and therefore little will come of the meeting.

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Indigenous Peoples Day and the Italian Medici Family
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Indigenous Peoples Day and the Italian Medici Family

The night before Indigenous Peoples Day, I reflected on what was evoked for me. Indigenous People’s Day, formally recognized by President Biden also happened to be the last day of the Medici Portraits and Politics 1312-1570 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so I went and continued my reflections.

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Nibbling On Hope at the Edge
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Nibbling On Hope at the Edge

My story in the work memoir, “Divining Chaos,” ends just before the 2020 election and won’t launch until June 2022. I am now making final copy edits. That means I can’t add anything substantive but I can review what the publisher’s editor suggests and consider a word change here or there. So in my epilogue, I can’t write about the Biden presidency, the insurrection, or global wildfires. I have to raise any issues I've considered since November 2020,…

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On Joy at the Edges
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

On Joy at the Edges

Despair is a difficult position. Besides an untenable accommodation to misery, it requires considering what we hope for: an end to: war? Saving beautiful species? Saving ourselves? A next date or a meal? How much can we grieve the mistakes of the Industrial revolution paradigm or the ubiquitous patriarchal system or routine, casual cruelties?

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Hope Despite Darkness
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Hope Despite Darkness

Hope is like the dawn. Both return despite the darkest night. The work of completing the “Ecoart in Action” book is wrapping up and now we are expanding the outreach of the ideas behind the book. The imminent publication and the process of outreach represents hope for the future at this very dark time for our planet. We are now fundraising to effect our outreach goals.

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The Mnemonics of Afghanistan and Titian
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

The Mnemonics of Afghanistan and Titian

It seems paradoxical, but I often use conventional landscape studies as a means to think out complex adaptive systems, relationships between disparate agents that culminate in foreseeable patterns, and my next steps as a new media/ interdisciplinary artist. It is all about how mnemonics manifest as the embodiment of insight.

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Lost Things; a Soliloquy on Love
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

Lost Things; a Soliloquy on Love

This time last year, I was deep into the project, Hunt for the Lost. I wanted to identify all the things we were mourning, as ecocide and fascism appeared to have made a marriage in hell that was pulling us all into an abyss of despair and destroying all value in the world before the 2020 presidential election.

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The Day Before I Turn 76 My Mind Is On Afghanistan As the Leading Edge of Despair
Aviva Rahmani Aviva Rahmani

The Day Before I Turn 76 My Mind Is On Afghanistan As the Leading Edge of Despair

What to call Afghanistan- a horror? A catastrophe? Whatever it is called, however tragic the immediate descent into totalitarian misogyny and cruelty, I am equally concerned about international repercussions and yet time advances and change is only predictable in retrospect no matter how clairvoyant or insightful I image myself to be.

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