Alumni
Cara Judea Alhadeff ’92
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, eco-anarchist mother, performance artist, photographer, writer, climate-justice organizer, and educator, has published dozens of critically-acclaimed books and essays. Former professor of Ecological Performance and Critical Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz, Alhadeff’s photographs and performance-videos are in private and public collections including MoMA Salzburg and San Francisco MoMA. In 2022, Alhadeff was nominated for a MacArthur Fellowship. Alhadeff photographs, teaches, performs, and parents creative-zero-waste living in her family’s eco-art installation repurposed school bus: www.carajudeaalhadeff.com
Mirror Immunities from Trickster Self Portrait Series
This Trickster Self-Portraits series is intended elicit the elasticity of the unknown in which “we call upon the agency of the trickster, the monster” (Bayo Akomolafe). One role of the trickster is to puncture the bubble of coherence/the illusion of stability and its concomitant “neutrality.” My Trickster Self-Portraits series includes images of my previous photography shoots projected across my body in "real time." I play with nonlinear time and disordered space to displace conventional ideas of the neutral, our habituated obedience to the status-quo. This includes disrupting Western imperialist taken-for-granted standard of living that continues to commit ecocide.
Salton Sea-Bombay Beach-Salinization Tank in the Anthropocene
Salton Sea, Bombay Beach; The Imperial Valley, California, I play at the border of California and Mexico, a nebulous artist colony on the edge of the Salton Sea, the largest lake in California. Flanked by the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range and vast desert “wasteland,” at the crown of California’s Imperial Valley, the Salton Sea is the heart of international Big Agribusiness. It hovers above the San Andreas fault (this cannot bode well when mining the world’s largest lithium deposit). The Salton Sea was first created in the 1880s through an ecologically disastrous engineering experiment in the name of “development and progress.” Once hailed the “All American Canal,” the Colorado River was diverted—over 80 miles long, providing irrigation water to the Imperial Valley/ Imperial Irrigation District that currently harvests $2.6 billion in agricultural sales. For almost 150 years, capitalism and profit continue to reign. The Imperial Valley still supplies the most “productive” agricultural industry in the world. We witness how “efficiency” (a la Jevons Paradox) renders capital for capitalism. This self-portrait series shot at Bombay Beach includes devastatingly contaminated land, air, and water. Agribusiness, urban “development,” and water tyrannies shape this region through the horrors of human hubris. Speculations claim that the Salton Sea contains the world’s largest lithium deposits—which will lead to catastrophic lithium mining for “green” technologies (batteries for electric vehicles, etc.) The salt-encrusted remains of former resorts (think Frank Sinatra, Sonny Bono) and second homes of Southern California’s elite mingle with strewn art objects (remnants from Burning Man) and discarded equipment from decades of diverting the Colorado River to support agriculture in the desert and atomic bomb testing. Geothermal energy plants, hot springs RV resorts, date palm Big Ag, miles of revegetation recuperation projects collide with the broken town of Bombay Beach—all sitting atop the San Andreas fault and all an ecotourist hot spot. In Stage 1, rebar & barbed wire scaffolding become the Fashion Mannequins; we, human bodies— naked, masked, flaunting elaborate displays of color, become the decoration—manipulated products that “clothe” the desiccated metal bodies while escaping the wild & domesticated “natural” world—also laden with contradictions.
