Cultural Emergency Response Vest

 

 

Text written for catalog for the exhibition, "Personal Structures," European Cultural Center, 2024 Venice Biennale:

Cultural Emergency Response Vest is an artifact of the body of work developed by artist and cultural organizer, Erin Genia during her tenure as an artist-in-residence for the City of Boston. Working within the city’s Office of Emergency Management during the Covid-19 pandemic, the artist incorporated her knowledge and experiences as a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota person and multidisciplinary artist, community organizer and educator to create Cultural Emergency Response - a framework that advocates for a major shift in collective approaches to solving the most pressing crises of our time through a decolonial lens. By creatively repurposing the methods and materials of disaster management to deal with their root cultural causes, the interconnected and existential issues of climate change, institutional racism, economic inequality, ecological collapse, global pandemic, wars, colonialism, Indigenous peoples’ dispossession—and so many others— can be addressed.

 

In all sectors of society, the evidence that we are in a state of cultural emergency is mounting, and people are demanding and organizing for change. Cultural Emergency Response recognizes that current political, economic, and social approaches to solving these crises fall short, and even perpetuate them because the underlying cultural causative factors are ignored.

How do we change culture? We can begin by understanding its origins. The philosophies and ideologies based upon Western European imperialism—rooted in the Roman empire – have spread across the globe through colonization and neoliberal capitalism, leaving a legacy of harm that has placed communities across the world in various states of chaos, conflict, misery and ecological degradation. These ideologies, which have come into dominance through force and assimilation, are profoundly misaligned with the natural world, and therefore the basis of all life. Cultural Emergency Response implicates these deeply embedded cultural norms that continue to mutate and expand, unabated, contributing to crises that threaten not only the lives and livelihoods of people across a multiplicity of divides, but also the future survival of our species and the web of life on Earth. Cultural Emergency Response offers critical approaches that strategize to remedy them at every level, from the personal to the societal, through a long-overdue structural process of re-alignment with Earth systems.

Merging her Dakota traditions with her work with the Office of Emergency Management, the artist created the fully beaded Cultural Emergency Response Vest, which took three years to complete. The piece acts as a focal point for communicating about the multi-faceted project, Cultural Emergency Response, to expresses a message of hope. The project also consists of community conversations organized by the artist, called “Confronting Colonial Myths in Boston's Public Space,” and a cultural emergency kit giveaway to people nominated by their community as “cultural emergency first responders.” The project also spawned a public art piece, articles, a book project, a pedagogical framework, web presence on the City of Boston website site, a zine, a flag, and various other artworks.