If you were at the RNC this week, you might have noticed a crowd of people staring into store front windows at the Germania Building at the corner of Wells Street and Plankinton Avenue. That’s where a series of art installations depicted different potential — and catastrophic — futures of our climate crisis.
Multidisciplinary artist, Annie Saunders, says she was approached by the organization, Climate Power, with a couple of goals for the “dioramas” and what they would display.
“We want to do something as close as possible to the RNC [and] as visible as possible,” says Saunders. “And we want it to be about these two issues: The relationship of politicians to the oil lobby and the nature of survival from extreme weather.”
Saunders works are often experiential, like the one in temporary installation in Milwaukee for the RNC. She says she likes people to see the work and have them be caught off guard by something surprising about her work. She also works in sound art, using headphones people use to walk around public spaces and experience a familiar place in a new way.
Dioramas are often related to things like museums to depict things that have happened in the past. Saunders said she wanted to use that familiarity to examine real life scenes from surviving extreme weather.
One of the windows that examines extreme weather features a Milwaukee-area actor, who can be seen struggling to fix an air conditioning unit. The actor is in what appears to be a child’s bedroom or nursery that’s been damaged by extreme heat. Saunders said that she took a lot of her inspiration in the rooms based on real life interviews she had with people who have been affected by extreme heat.
“People I talked to in Arizona again and again said, if you can't cool down, you're not going to make it, like if you don't have cooling, you won't survive. The air conditioner working is a matter of life and death,” Saunders says. “It's interesting that the type of materials that are most affected by extreme heat, like plastic, are the objects that are most marketed to some of the most vulnerable people to extreme heat and so I decided that this room should be a kid's playroom.”
Another installation shows the effects of flooding and has an actor on a couch rifling through paperwork and bills. Saunders says something she heard from flood survivors was that they were inundated with paperwork from their insurance, to FEMA, all while their bills piled up. The room also showed flood damaged walls, precious heirlooms broken and water slowly dripping into the space.
“We've had moments of huge crowds of people … filming and saying it's all bulls***,” Saunders says to the reaction to her piece. “And people walking by here and saying, 'Yeah, I'm a Republican and I'm a Trump voter, but like, my house flooded, I recognize this situation.'”
With a lack of public art around the RNC this week, Saunders piece pops even more. She says she recognizes that has to do with a lot of community members choosing to avoid downtown either for not feeling safe, or it being inaccessible with the barriers. Even so, she says that her experience in Milwaukee, and with this installation, has been “a pleasure.”
“Milwaukee has been a really beautiful and welcoming place to do this work,” says Saunders. “In terms of what I hope people take away is … that they feel the interconnectedness of all of these issues. That's what this is really trying to do is show these separate scenes that are all so deeply and delicately interconnected in a way that affects all of us and what they're trying to do.”
