Portable Memories in Rising Seas is a socially engaged, multimedia project about sea level rise. The project works to connect memory to climate change, creating antidotes for grief and solastalgia (homesickness while one is still at home). The drawings shown here at YBCA were originally made by participants in South Florida to represent their individual and collective memories of living with sea level rise. Participants’ drawings were interpreted into prints by FIFTY-FIFTY and shared with nearby sea life in an attempt to keep memories local; the documentation of this underwater interaction is presented on the video shown here. Together, the prints and video ask: how do we grapple with the reality that the places we know are changing as the climate changes? How will we remember these places and who we’ve been in relationship to them? Can the act of remembering inform the futures we create?  

Contribute Your Memories

As part of this presentation of Portable Memories in Rising Seas at YBCA, you are invited to submit memories of places that are meaningful to you and under threat due to climate change, such as memories of the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean. Your digital participation will be documented and become part of the larger archive of memories. 

Click here to submit your memories →

Portable Memories in Rising Seas can be experienced in-person outside of the Blue Shield of California Theater at YBCA.