Cultural Resiliency Amid Rising Waters with Artist Kim Anno

In this episode of "Art Heals All Wounds," I speak with multidisciplinary artist Kim Anno. Our conversation centers around Kim's commitment to addressing climate change through her art, particularly after seeing a photograph of the president of The Maldives signing a document underwater. This image served as Kim's climate alarm bell, prompting her to shift her art practice to focus on climate and environmental issues.

Kim shares insights about her film projects, which explore rising waters and their impacts on communities worldwide. Currently, she is working on a film about Indonesia's decision to relocate its capital from the rapidly sinking Jakarta on the island of Java to Nusantara on the island of Borneo. This massive undertaking raises questions about the effects on biodiversity, indigenous populations, and cultural heritage.

Throughout the conversation, Kim emphasizes the interconnectedness of global communities and the challenges posed by industrialization, consumerism, and climate change. She conveys how younger generations are hopeful and intent on fostering cultural resilience in the face of environmental challenges.

Key Topics:

·       The impact of a powerful photograph on Kim Anno's art practice.

·       The significance of Jakarta's relocation due to climate change.

·       The cultural and environmental implications of moving a major city.

·       The importance of documenting and showcasing cultural resilience.

·       The role of younger generations in imagining a sustainable future.

·       Discussion on the global interconnectedness concerning climate impact.

·       The urgency of addressing water scarcity and climate change.

·       Kim Anno's "Men and Women in Water Cities" film series.

·       The global role in exacerbating climate issues for island nations like Indonesia.

·       The move of Indonesia’s capital from Jakarta to Nusantara.

·       The challenges of preserving cultural practices amidst environmental upheaval.

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Transcript

Pam Uzzell [00:00:12]:
Do you believe art can change the world? So do I! On this show, we meet artists whose work is doing just that. Welcome to Art Heals All Wounds. I'm your host, Pam Uzzell. My guest today remembers seeing a photograph of the president of The Maldives signing a document underwater. She says that this was her climate alarm bell. That photo had such a strong effect on her that she decided from that moment on her work needed to address climate and the environment. Kim Anno is a multidisciplinary artist.

Pam Uzzell [00:01:02]:
She created a film practice, and much of her work centers on rising waters. Kim is currently working on a film about Indonesia's plan to move its capital from Jakarta on the island of Java to Nusantara on the island of Borneo. There are over 11,000,000 people in Jakarta. It's like the population of New York City and Los Angeles combined. Jakarta is a city with rich history and culture. It's also the fastest sinking city in the world, due to the amount of groundwater that's been removed. Subsidence in Jakarta has been a problem since the nineteen seventies, but I've read that it may have begun as early as the eighteenth century due to the clearing of forests by the Dutch. The island of Borneo is a place with incredible biodiversity, hosting many species only found there.

Pam Uzzell [00:02:00]:
There's a significant indigenous population with multiple languages, customs, and cultures as well, which will soon host a capital city built for many millions. This movement of such a large city is probably one of the most perplexing undertakings that are a result of the industrialized world failing to address its hunger for fossil fuels and plastic. While Kim doesn't have the answers about how to undertake this, she's making a film to bear witness to this attempt to balance the needs of a city and the environment, in the face of the impacts created by colonialism and the inability to curb carbon emissions, primarily in countries far away such as The US. What will be the effects on biodiversity and culture?You wanna know how you can really help me keep this show going? Follow me on your favorite listening app. So easy. Right? And if you really wanna give the show a boost, leave me a five star rating or review. Hi, Kim. Thank you so much for being on Art Heals All Wounds.

Pam Uzzell [00:03:25]:
Can you start by telling us who you are and what you do?

Kim Anno [00:03:29]:
My name is Kim Anno, and I'm an artist and currently living in Berkeley, California. I've been born and raised in Los Angeles. I both make paintings and sculpture and books and prints. I'm kind of a restless artist. I make a lot of different creative modalities, and I also make films. I've been a film, developed a film practice since 2010. There was a photograph that I saw of the president of The Maldives signing documents underwater that was in 02/2009, Mohammed Nasheed. And ever since I saw that photograph, I changed my practice entirely because I it was like one photograph was the catalyst.

Pam Uzzell [00:04:17]:
Okay. So describe that. When you say you changed your practice, do you mean to film or do you mean in terms of the content of what you were doing your work on?

Kim Anno [00:04:27]:
I would say both. I saw this photograph, and he's the president of a nation, and he's signing government documents underwater with his cabinet and desks. And I said to myself, some the alarm bell just went off in my mind thinking time is short. If you're gonna do something about climate and impacting audiences that you don't have, you better start now. And so that's what I did. I said, okay. I'm not sure how to do it, but I'm gonna try. And I taught myself filmmaking by putting small objects and creating these water puppet shows in fish tanks.

Kim Anno [00:05:08]:
And I would videotape those things and make little narratives and scenarios. And and then after I did that for a while, I was like, I gotta put people in these things. So that's what I did. I then I was like, okay. I'm gonna teach myself how to make a film. And I did. Yeah.

Pam Uzzell [00:05:28]:
Well, you have this series. What is it called? "Men and Women in Water" series?

Kim Anno [00:05:32]:
"Men and Women in Water Cities?"

Pam Uzzell [00:05:34]:
In water cities. That's right. Talk about those films.

Kim Anno [00:05:39]:
So I decided that I was gonna make this epic project, and it'll probably go on till I'm dead. That because the subjects are unlimited. Because I was born and raised in Los Angeles on the coast, I just felt sensitized to the proximity of the ocean, and I started to look around about the impacts of sea level rise on people around the world. Of course, I started with The Maldives because they have to relocate 300,000 citizens today. And then I went to other countries and just started studying, and I realized I wanted to make something that showed or centered cultural resiliency. That cultural resiliency in a time when the the landmasses are shrinking and the water is entering the main areas of these cities and these communities, that the people want to survive and thrive as well even during this period of challenge. So I want I began this quest. It's kind of like a a quest to image what the future might look like and how people can create cultural resiliency wherever they are with the local people in those areas.

Pam Uzzell [00:07:02]:
Yeah. That's interesting. I watched these, and they're kind of fascinating. Sometimes you've got people I don't know if this was the order it was done, but some people definitely are kind of still mostly out of the water doing whatever they're doing. But at a certain point, people become completely submerged in many of them. And those are really interesting because I think as a species we have so much connection to water, but those are not comfortable to watch those really honestly.

Kim Anno [00:07:36]:
Yeah. They're, they're challenging. I thought of them as training films, like people training to live underwater. I studied Esther Williams movies and how how does the camera person actually capture that. And so I tried some of her techniques, which, like, these things, these breathing tubes, and then there's a whole problem of buoyancy. Like, everything either sinks or floats to the top. So the mid space is really challenging, like, how to capture the mid space. And I was doing that with the fish tanks.

Kim Anno [00:08:12]:
I was like, okay. How do I make these things that kinda hang in mid space? And my dad was still alive, and he's a physicist. And we were kinda doing that together, talking about the properties of buoyancy and, you know, wave action and all kinds of different things and to kinda get things to just hang where you can see them in the middle of the tank. And it's true in in a, like, a swimming pool or a water body. You're kind of looking to see where you can find that middle image. And it's a scientific thing. You kinda have to rehearse it a thousand times.

Pam Uzzell [00:08:51]:
Wow. I know we're gonna talk about your current project soon, but I just would love to know. Was it hard to find people who are willing to get into a pool in suits and ties and nice shoes and lovely elegant dresses? I mean, like, who are the people who are in your films?

Kim Anno [00:09:11]:
Well, the first film I made, I called on all the people that I've collaborated with in the past and also some students, some friends. Some of the people who are no longer living are in those films, and they were just willing to try it with me, you know, like, be experimental and try it. Sports and dance and music are the biggest tools in this toolbox of films. I always have to have those three things in certain ways. And one is because I grew up with my brother and sister are both professional athletes. And so sports was, like, integrated into our house, like, a lot. And then the other thing is leisure time. Like, I'm very interested in in preserving leisure time, like, you know, so that people are are not just about what they do for their work, but how they enjoy life.

Kim Anno [00:10:16]:
And although my family could probably say that I'm workaholic and I should just be enjoying life. So I haven't learned my own lessons, but I am very curious about it. And I think that I realized that I wanted to change my audience too, in 2010. I wanted a younger audience. I was starting to have an older and older audience with with more money and not that an artist isn't tied to the moneyed class, we are, but I I that wasn't enough for me. It wasn't enough for me to make art for the moneyed class. Like, I needed to make art for a much broader audience.

Pam Uzzell [00:10:59]:
Yeah.

Kim Anno [00:10:59]:
And so that's how sports and music and all these things came into it.

Pam Uzzell [00:11:04]:
Right. Right. Well, let's do talk about your current project. When you told me about this, boy, my mind really was captured by it.

Kim Anno [00:11:16]:
Yeah. So I I consider myself a social practice filmmaker also being that I wanna provide something to a community that it's a reciprocal relationship and that whenever you're working with local people it's not that I won't work with actors, I I do, but most of the time I'm working with non actors who also have their own joys and hopes and dreams and things. And I want them to communicate what those are. And I've done this project now in South Africa and in California and in Florida and Cuba. I'm still editing a piece called 90 miles from paradise, which is, the relationship between Southern Florida and Cuba, which is also a fraught kind of situation. So like in my, in that particular film, the people are kind of battling. They're having like a battle, but in the end, they help each other type thing.

Kim Anno [00:12:21]:
This new project, Water Cities Indonesia, I knew that Southeast Asia was disproportionately impacted by sea level rise and lack of drinking water. And, really, when we think about the global problem, lack of drinking water is really gonna be the biggest issue, and that water will be a problem for harvesting food and cultivating food. And so people could lose their land mass. They can certainly live in boats and on piers and create technologies to kind of have flexible architecture, which there is in The Netherlands and in Korea and all around the world. Kunlé Adeyemi has a bunch of incredible communities in Lagos. So this flexible architecture is also disproportionate in terms of how good it is with the access to people with a lot more money and privilege. And so poor people have always lived in coastal communities with very temporal kind of existences with their infrastructures. And so I wanted to find out about Indonesia and how it was surviving this this these issues.

Kim Anno [00:13:37]:
And then I started to read about the moving of the capital to a new city called Nusantara. So Jakarta will move its government first, to the island of Borneo, which is shared by three countries, Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia. And I haven't been able to physically see the the city itself because they're keeping that kinda protected. But just the idea of moving one of the world's megacities is fascinating to me, and, you know, there's anxiety about it. There's thrill about it. There's there's so many complicated feelings. What happens to Borneo? And Borneo still also has its flooding issues, but it's much higher up than Java is. So becomes a more stable location for their capital.

Kim Anno [00:14:31]:
And to the Indonesian's history credit, they wanted to move this capital before sea level rise. I'm not exactly sure why that was, but it's not new that they wanted to move the capital. What's new was the pace of the move. And so they're they talk about 2045 being the the time when a lot of people move millions, actually.

Pam Uzzell [00:14:56]:
Well, after you told me about this, I've just been reading about it, and I'm not sure I I did read that this is not the first that this has actually been for decades that they've wanted to move the capital. And some of the reasons, which I don't know if this is why historically they wanted to move the capital, but some of the reasons were to have a less, centralized center of economic prosperity. That right now, Java and Jakarta are the economic centers of of Indonesia, and the rest of the islands are essentially not sharing in that.

Kim Anno [00:15:36]:
I think that's true. I think commerce is intense in Indonesia and also, you know, other parts of Southeast Asia. There are cities where there's a huge economic engine. And how do you diversify that and move it into other areas is a good question.

Pam Uzzell [00:15:55]:
And I don't know if that is what has influenced the long standing idea to move the capital, but getting back to your theme of water cities, I've never been to Jakarta. I did read too. It's interesting you brought up freshwater that water extraction is a huge reason why Jakarta, I think I read is the fastest sinking city in the world, is groundwater extraction.

Kim Anno [00:16:24]:
Right. Subsidence. Yeah.

Pam Uzzell [00:16:25]:
Yes. And now with coupled with sea level rise is just something that's not sustainable. But I'm I'm wondering what you've seen having been to Jakarta.

Kim Anno [00:16:39]:
Jakarta is the traffic. The first thing you notice is, like, there is so much traffic. So it takes a while to get from one place to the next, and I guess rapid transit is not as developed. They do have trains, and I didn't ride on any, but, the central area is all motorcycles and cars. And so you hear the noise of motorcycles all the time because that's the the easiest thing that people can get. And so there are motorcycle taxis everywhere, so everyone hops on the back of a motorcycle. And that's, I think, true of many cultures, especially island nations. In Cuba also, there's a lot of motorcycles.

Kim Anno [00:17:24]:
So, yeah, I mean, it's dense, and there's a lot of tourism. There's hotels, and it's smoggy. The air is smoggy. There's fascinating things, you know, like, they have really great museums, they have contemporary art, they have a lot of dance performance. Dance is so integrated into Indonesian culture. It's amazing. So there's all kinds of dance, and they're all presenting it in different places. And people come there just to see the dance.

Kim Anno [00:17:55]:
The other thing they have is a huge industry of textiles. You'll notice some of our clothes are all sewn in Indonesia and in the labels that they put in there, but they also have their own indigenous textile industry. That is stunning. I mean, I've never seen so many different kinds of textiles in one country, weavings and tapestries and, you know, all kinds of things that are made all over the islands. And there are art historians just just in Indonesian textiles, studying those things. So there's a lot of cultural richness about Jakarta, but it's like other cities like Sao Paulo and Mexico City. It's these are dense populated cities that have the kind of difficulties about it too, you know, like, in in terms of getting around in the air.

Pam Uzzell [00:18:53]:
Well, I know just from reading, the concerns of moving this capital are, you know, varied. And, obviously, there's the environmental impact. There's such biodiversity on Borneo. What would be the impact of moving the sort of movement of a large city there? I know that there are indigenous tribes who live on Borneo. There's concerns around that. One thing I do wanna ask you about is this idea of you just talked about the cultural richness of Jakarta. And what does that mean when you're going to attempt to move a city like this? What what? I don't expect you to have all these answers, but I am just thinking about the cultural impacts.

Kim Anno [00:19:49]:
Yeah. You know, that's one of the reasons what I did was bring two, let's see. I brought some kids from Java, from two schools. One is called a green school because they have a system of green schools, which is interesting, that are environmentally focused. And then one is called Techno Natura, which was a technical school with a lot of engineering things, and they've won a lot of prizes for, like, robotics and things. So I brought some kids from those schools to East Kalimantan, four schools in East Kalimantan that are more rural schools, more working class schools. And so the idea was to get the Javanese kids to talk to the East Kalimantan kids and kind of integrate themselves and and actually have fun together and make a dance, which we did.

Pam Uzzell [00:20:39]:
And East Kalimantan is there on Borneo near the site where they're going to

Kim Anno [00:20:44]:
Yeah. East Kalimantan is the area where Nusantara is being built out. And these schools near the Borneo Orangutan Foundation are, because the Orangutan Foundation integrates with schools all the time with education. So they hooked us up with some of the schools that they work with. And we were just kind of looking at the orangutans and their environment and and staying there at a lodge with the foundation and having orangutan education. So they they do spend quite a bit of time with animal education, and that seems to be very integrated into their plan is to respect nature, and this is what they're saying. Of course, when you make a new city, there's an impact on the ground. I don't really know what that is.

Kim Anno [00:21:39]:
I can imagine they've they've clear cut a lot of, forest to to do it, but I don't fault the Indonesians. They they have to do it. And, you know, like, there's they really don't have a choice that the developed nations created this carbon problem, which contributed to the acceleration of the pace of this move, and they just have to do it. And there I think there is awareness of how how can we protect the animals at the same time and the insect community at the same time.

Pam Uzzell [00:22:12]:
Yeah, it's so concerning. And from both sides, I mean, I also wonder even now, how are people, especially people with less means coping with the water in Jakarta.

Kim Anno [00:22:29]:
Yeah. You know, that's something I feel a little bit like I don't have enough information about. I do know that they have kampungs, and the kampungs are villages of people that live on the edge. And they travel by boats, and and they have houses with piers and docks that are floating. And I can imagine and this is true, like, from from I've done some lectures on Kunlé Adeyemi's work that there are poor people around the world who already live in water and have has this precarity about their lives forever, for generations. The storms are stronger. There's more losses and, you know, there's more challenges. And then the issue of drinking water comes up.

Kim Anno [00:23:20]:
I mean, everyone has to have bottled water, Because there's so much bacteria in the water. And it's whatever it is that there's enough infrastructure to clean the water. And I think island nations all over the world suffer from that. So I can imagine the impact on poor people is harder. You know? Like, they don't have resources to weather the changes and the the challenges that they're now doing. And my hope is that this generation alpha, which is the kids that the voice of this film is the generation alpha, will be able to kind of understand that and address it in some way. And I'm sure the Indonesian government is already doing that that I don't know about. So I'm gonna be finding out more about that.

Kim Anno [00:24:16]:
But when resources are scarce, you know, in any situation that people with means are able to weather things a lot better than those without.

Pam Uzzell [00:24:26]:
I'm wondering about the style and the approach of this film. I know that your film Cuba is much more like a narrative documentary that's driven by interviews, cut into narrations and things like that. And your other films are more abstract. What how do you envision this film?

Kim Anno [00:24:47]:
That's a really good question. I do the thing in some ways, like other documentary filmmakers, where I set up the situation and I see what happens. And then that situation influences how I wanna structure the film. I mean, right now, I have a sample of this dance that cuts back and forth between the animals, the orangutans, and the kids learning the dance. So I would say music is gonna be really foregrounded. I'm working with Indonesian bands and going to their studios and talking to the composers, etcetera. I'm very interested in popular music of Indonesia and what's it like, and I have been using some of it, which is, like, a big thrill to me. So I'm not exactly sure.

Kim Anno [00:25:38]:
I I know this will be more of an experimental documentary and not a traditional documentary because I'm not I'm not really interviewing very many people. I'm kind of doing cinema verite the whole time. And in January, the the 4 teenagers that I've been kind of including their voices, they did have interviews, all four of these people. They're gonna be coming with me to Borobudur in Yogyakarta, and I chose that site because it's a world heritage site. It's it was made in the tenth century. There's an incredible amount of history there. And I want the the young people to be thinking about long time and what does it mean in their lives and how, you know, how do they see themselves in the future, and what are their crazy ideas, and how will they culturally thrive in a very fast changing world in this new landmass, etcetera. So we're gonna be walking around just filming them with lavs.

Kim Anno [00:26:43]:
Yeah.

Pam Uzzell [00:26:45]:
One thing that keeps going through my mind is that, of course, there are things happening in Jakarta, which are happening in many places, including The United States, like, the over extraction of groundwater, which is causing sinking and also lack of a real scarcity of water to drink. Although here, again, it really depends on where you are, how that's happening.

Kim Anno [00:27:11]:
Yeah. I mean, in California, we have a million people without drinking water in the valley.

Pam Uzzell [00:27:15]:
That's right. And, yeah, people's belief that it's it's an infinite source, which it's like there's nothing on earth that's infinite.

Kim Anno [00:27:24]:
Yeah. It's what is it? It's like 1% of all the water is drinkable, something like that. Less than 1%.

Pam Uzzell [00:27:31]:
Yeah. I don't know. I've never heard that statistic, but I believe you. One thing I think about is the way that our lifestyles impact someplace that seems so far away, like Indonesia and even something as tiny as our insatiable appetite for things made with palm oil, how that affects, you know, animal populations. Yeah.

Kim Anno [00:27:59]:
I mean, consumers, consumers drive industries and, countries export. And yes, palm oil is there's no it's insatiable and it does have a lot of impact on the, the forest for sure.

Pam Uzzell [00:28:16]:
Right. And our overreliance on plastic.

Kim Anno [00:28:20]:
Yes.

Pam Uzzell [00:28:20]:
The irony is that it's putting some places where that's the only way they can drink water, is out of plastic.

Kim Anno [00:28:27]:
Yeah. It's so I it's so disturbing, isn't it?

Pam Uzzell [00:28:31]:
It is disturbing, especially when you are from a wealthier country and the the cultural one of the biggest cultural norms is to consume.

Kim Anno [00:28:41]:
Yeah. And the oil company's driving up the hunger for more and more plastics so they can offset their profits into plastic.

Pam Uzzell [00:28:49]:
As opposed to fuel.

Kim Anno [00:28:50]:
One of the kids in my film talks about plastic and and reduction of plastic.

Pam Uzzell [00:28:55]:
Yeah. I mean, one thing that I think is interesting, and I'm wondering how much of this you're going to focus on, is the impact of places like The United States and Europe, China, India now on these other island nations?

Kim Anno [00:29:12]:
Yeah, you know, that's so great. You asked that question, because I was thinking of getting the young people to talk about that. What would they do? What message do they wanna tell the audience about the squandering of carbon and the stealing of their, you know, the kind of, air, water, you know, groundwater, those kind of things coming from the developed nations, like what would they tell the developed nations? You know, it's not they're they're at the receiving end of it. Of course, every community has their own contribution, but the scale of the fix, has nothing to do with the inter internal workings of the Indonesian country. It has way more to do with the rest of the developed nations. And so what would those young people say and how, what would they do? Would they take action? Would they think about it? Like I'm going to be asking them those things as they walk around Borobudur.

Pam Uzzell [00:30:13]:
Yeah. The other thing I think of is that this is a foreshadowing of the future of the world, developed countries or not. And we know that there are so many inequities even in a supposedly rich country as The US, which we are rich, but we know that most people in The US are not wealthy. And places like New York, New Orleans, Washington, DC, you know, that there are some fairly both economically and culturally rich places here that are facing the same problem and have not made the same idea to move, but will probably be making that idea.

Kim Anno [00:30:59]:
Yeah. And actually in The U S that we've already moved, climate refugees from New Orleans area, South Of New Orleans, those islands, those outer islands, those people were moved off and put somewhere. And I don't know where they went actually, which it'd be cool to find out where they went. I see what you're saying. You know, we we haven't made like, for instance, in Pacifica, I was I was an artist in Pacifica trying to conduct a town dialogue because, half the town feels like, they need to move back from the waterline. And and also the California Coastal Commission is asking that the city of Pacifica to move 90 families back from the waterline, and and no one is willing to move. And so they they say that they just wanna die on their on their property. This is kinda what they're saying.

Kim Anno [00:31:54]:
And then the town elected these real estate agents that are still digging in the tsunami zone to put up, like, you know, luxury condos and stuff. So the denial about people needing to move back from the waterline and refusing to is just stunning. In Mexico, the I also work with this tribal, community called Comcáac in this island this sort of island, where they have their territory, the largest island landmass in Mexico, and they moved 60 families back from the waterline. They too have challenged drinking water. They're a desert island, but they've been there for three millennium also. And one of their tribal elders, who you might wanna interview, Alberto Molado Moreno, wrote a three volume set on the history of the tribe, the three thousand years of the tribe. And they they harvested turtles and and mollusks in that area. And so their conservationists reintroduced mollusks into their fisheries that are the size of a plate.

Kim Anno [00:33:02]:
You know? Wow. And it's hard for them to get it to market because it's so far down there. You need a four wheel drive vehicle, etcetera. But there's a thousand people living on this island mass, and they were willing to move. They realized they had to move. And Right. The government, the Mexican government moved them back. So governments are not gonna be able to move everybody.

Kim Anno [00:33:26]:
You know? And Right. Those that move quicker, sooner are gonna be more beneficial than those that wait. I mean, in a way, you know, you would have to admire the Indonesian government to say, we're gonna move half of our 11,000,000 population of Jakarta to Borneo. They're thinking ahead, You know?

Pam Uzzell [00:33:47]:
Yeah. It's so stressful when you think about the environmental and cultural impact. On the other hand, that's easy for me to say from here.

Kim Anno [00:33:55]:
Yeah. Mhmm.

Pam Uzzell [00:33:57]:
You know? I mean and even wow. Yeah. I I do I'm very curious. I I will probably I may not be alive in 2045, but, you know, I'm curious to watch the progress of this, and I'm curious to watch the progress in our own country because, yeah, a lot of people I was just reading a fascinating article about New Orleans that they've done studies, and it's like, there's nothing really at this point that we can do about our situation with water, the city as it is is just I mean, not tomorrow, but it is doomed. Yeah. You know?

Kim Anno [00:34:39]:
I've driven through the San Joaquin Valley of California where the gas stations were closed because there wasn't any more water, and they couldn't pump the gas, and they didn't want the cars to stop and try to use the bathroom or something like that because there was no more water for that day. They had to wait till the aquifers were filled again. And and so and all of those towns in there mostly made up of farm workers, who are, you know, agricultural workers. And even the UC Berkeley lab up here is, trying to come up with tomatoes that are more drought resistant. They've they've already signed off on lettuce. And so lettuce is moving towards, Washington state because you cannot grow the lettuce in the weather and the lack of water that we have in the valley anymore.

Pam Uzzell [00:35:35]:
Right. Right. Which again, though, is the same. That's also the place that floods, which really until the last few years I mean, most of the time when I've lived in California, it's been about drought. And these last three or four years where we've had a lot of rain, I I had no idea that the Central Valley would flood like that. And, I mean, it was an inland sea, so I guess it's not it shouldn't be that surprising, but what is what is just kills me is reading about people who have grown up in that area and bought their dream home there. And now that the rains are coming back, like, just devastation to those homes, it's just Yeah. It's really something it's so easy if you haven't been, you know, we're not here in a fire zone at this time.

Pam Uzzell [00:36:34]:
Lots of places in the Bay Area flood, but luckily so far, my house is not one.

Kim Anno [00:36:40]:
Right.

Pam Uzzell [00:36:41]:
So it's so easy to feel completely

Kim Anno [00:36:44]:
Like distant or something. Like, it doesn't happen to us, so we're not gonna worry about it.

Pam Uzzell [00:36:49]:
Right. But by the same token, all of our behaviors are I mean, the interconnectedness of the world is never been more apparent.

Kim Anno [00:36:59]:
Yes. That's so true. I totally agree with that. The COVID vaccine was so important to us to survive this pandemic. And when you read about what it did to those horseshoe crabs, like devastated the whole horseshoe crab population globally, because they used the blood of horseshoe crabs for the vaccines. Yeah.

Pam Uzzell [00:37:25]:
I do remember that now that you're bringing it up.

Kim Anno [00:37:27]:
We are interconnected for sure.

Pam Uzzell [00:37:29]:
We're interconnected. Okay. I I'm, I'm so glad you're making this film. I'm so excited to see its progress.

Kim Anno [00:37:40]:
Thank you so much. I, you know, I look to young people because I when I started making the films, I wanted to have some indicting material or some some difficult material. Much of the young people did not want to image that. They wanted to image the future and cultural resiliency and how they're gonna survive. Like, we played a soccer match in the ocean and created an adaptation of soccer. So adapting to a different world, a changed landmass, inviting the water in, integrating that into your life, and being able to thrive and live like that is what they what they're interested in. They they they want a future. They don't want the dark picture.

Kim Anno [00:38:27]:
So I constantly feel this, you know, mission to kind of, like, image the thing that they want.

Pam Uzzell [00:38:36]:
Well, I can't wait to see what you come back with, Kim.

Kim Anno [00:38:41]:
Thank you so much, Pam.

Pam Uzzell [00:38:46]:
You're listening to Art Heals All Wounds. Thank you to Kim Anno for talking about her work, especially her film in progress following the move of Indonesia's capital from Jakarta to Nusantara. Kim is truly one of the most prolific and thoughtful artists that I know, and I'll put all of her information in the show notes so you can follow what she's working on. Have you had a climate alarm bell? I'd love to hear about it. You can leave me a voice mail on my website, arthealsallwoundspodcast.com, and I'll share it on the show. If you feel so inclined and are able to, you can also leave me a donation on my website. Just click on buy me a coffee. This podcast is completely independent, so every little bit helps.

Pam Uzzell [00:40:00]:
Thanks for listening. The music you've heard in this podcast is by Ketsa and Lobo Loco. This podcast was edited by Iva Hristova.