Red Hook: The Future is Now

Eve Mosher

What can we learn from the past, to propel us into the future?

Red Hook has a long history of working with the water, and the water that surrounds it plays a big part in defining the future of the neighborhood as its impacts are felt within a changing climate.

I will lead a team of local youth, ages 8–18 to investigate the neighborhood’s knowledge, experience and perceptions of climate change. We will also research the proposed plans for resiliency infrastructure to protect the neighborhood. From this research, we will collectively design a representation or response on the future of Red Hook and it’s waterways.

Our six month project will begin by defining a set of questions on Red Hook, climate change, culture, community and water. We will determine the best methods for collecting and recording our exchanges. The team will work collaboratively to decide on goals, how and when we meet and how the budget is allocated. My hope is to build an environment in which the youth are able to hold space for not only their own identities and ideas, but also those of the entire community.

Our entire process will be embedded with creativity — storytelling as team building, movement for interpretation, drawing as recording. We will also connect with many people living and inhabiting Red Hook, from long term residents to new businesses, from recreational visitors to cultural organizations to workers.

Our outcome may be something we create immediately as a space for the ongoing conversations such as pop up cultural and community space, or regular gatherings in the form of picnics, play days or other activities — assemblies which are informal but also safe spaces for conversations over the future of a community. Or we might complete the entire process of research and collecting stories and then develop a final work which may be performative, installation-based, interactive or otherwise engaged with people from throughout the neighborhood.

As an artist, I operate as a researcher, facilitator and instigator focused on urban environmental issues with a particular focus on the future of the urban ecosystem and climate change. My history of work includes facilitated conversations and collaborations across disciplines, community-based and networked sustainable infrastructure, tool building for local instigations, and longer term projects in which community is built through a shared experience. I approach all work as collaboration and approach collaboration as a process in which everyone who comes to the project has experience and knowledge that is a valuable asset in the creative process. We are all also, inherently creative and collaborative, my position as artist is to facilitate and channel the various energies, ideas and personalities into a cohesive piece which builds social resilience.

Images represent a variety of community projects built from a collaborative process.