Lying between the tidal marks, an intertidal is an area that lies above water at low tide and is flooded underwater at high tide. In its tamest depiction, it is a coastal environment where coral, starfish, and hermit crabs stumble and float with and against the ebb of daily tides. Yet, in this exhibition, the word intertidal points to a zone less akin with wilderness and more like the conditions described in Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate fiction New York 2140. In the novel, the entirety of New York City is an intertidal zone, a place where existence has been redefined by a 50 foot permanent surge in sea level rise. Buildings, political structures, social networks, economies and ecologies have all been reconfigured–or re-engineered–to avoid extinction. It is a place where the inorganic, organic, and social have fused simultaneously. For A.S.T, Miami’s current intertidal condition is a calcified cross-cut of real estate speculations, transactions, normalized king tides and the storm pumps that keep streets dry. It is an event horizon, a point of no return, within the cone of climate certainty.
In 2018, A.S.T. was commissioned by curator Natalia Zuluaga with ArtCenter South Florida to create a multi-disciplinary experience of what speculative urbanism may feel like in the age of sea level rise. Featuring newly commissioned video, audio script, wall drawings, and architectural interventions, Intertidal reads like a scrambled series of messages from a not so distant future. The result is a proposal that is simultaneously in three temporalities: dealing, imagining, and planning in the present based on a future that already contends with the lived effects of our mistakes from the past. While the exhibition confronts what often feels like an inevitable cataclysmic event, it does not propose an apocalyptic vision of the future or a collapse of possibilities in facing it. Instead, the sounds, images, and environment created by A.S.T. posit Miami and its distinct position between swamp and sea as a leader in getting submerged, and as such proposes the city could be a model for how best to proceed.
Intertidal was accompanied by a series of public programs including Conversation: The Contemporary Coast, a discussion with A.S.T. with Dr. Meryl Shriver-Rice, Director of Environmental Media at the University of Miami, Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy.
