WORK

My current projects draw on extensive fieldwork in Tuvalu, a remote island nation in the South Pacific. With rising seas threatening to inundate their low-lying atolls, the people of Tuvalu grapple with complex questions of home and belonging. For Tuvaluans, connection to home is not abstract; it is ancestral, atomic. As their homeland faces forecasts of imminent extinction, inhabitants must make choices of what to do with all these ancestors and atoms.

Current responses include international migration schemes, major coastal infrastructure projects, and the development of digital tools to preserve elements of the country’s history and culture. The concerns these initiatives elicit are pertinent not only for those who call this tiny nation home but for all of us who inhabit a rapidly changing world that so often threatens to slip under:

Does home exist in space or time? 
What does it mean to save, and who dictates the terms of salvation?
When we attempt to transmute the physical to the digital, what remains and what gets lost?

These questions and others find expression through word, sound, and image in the projects below.


  • An international consulting firm attempts to upload entire ecosystems to the metaverse. A young man returns to his home island after a decade only to find it unrecognizable due to severe coastal erosion. A renowned archaeologist excavates the resting grounds of a former chief in the hopes of finding evidence of an original settlement before the site is washed away. A complex legal battle embroils the local council of elders who disagree about the ownership of artificially constructed land. A mother decides how to raise her adopted infant in a new country without the cultural safeguards of home.

    This nonfiction work weaves an overlapping tangle of narratives that compete to tell the truth about the state of a nation. It is an exploration of how differing worldviews drastically alter the ways in which their proponents make sense of the future.

  • According to the prevailing ‘sinking nation’ narrative about Tuvalu, water is the antagonist. Any Tuvaluan knows, however, that what may one day take away life on their island is also what provides and sustains it.

    This ambient album is an interview with water. Babbling in its own grammar and syntax, water offers its perspective on the topic of sea level rise through the snapping crackles of hungry shrimp, slippery whispers of sand, roaring crashes of waves through subterranean limestone, and tickling patters of rainfall.

    The compilation of underwater audio recordings is punctuated with brief remarks about the sea from an array of Tuvaluans. The sparse commentary suggests the multifaceted nature of the community’s relationship with its aquatic surroundings while underscoring its smallness in the face of the ocean’s vast magnitude.

  • Documentary photographer Arthur Mercier and I are collaborating on a virtual reality experience centered on the initiatives using digital tools to preserve Tuvalu’s cultural heritage. This VR experience will be housed in an exhibit setting. Further details are not yet public.