Spelling out the urgent need for a green energy transition

McCarthy Quad on the USC University Park Campus is a popular spot for students to recline and relax, whether on the lawns or in hammocks between the trees.

But at noon on March 1, lying down in the quad will become an act of protest against social and climate injustice during the event El Respiro / Respire, presented by USC Visions and Voices and organized by the USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Artist Carolina Caycedo MFA ’14, an alumna of the USC Roski School of Art and Design, will lead the USC community, art and environmental leaders and the public in what she calls a “geochoreography.” With their bodies, participants will spell out the phrase “Just Transition Now” in English and Spanish (“Transición Justa Ya”).

The phrase is a rallying cry for a shift from fossil fuels to green energy sources — one that is protective of the natural world, as well as fair and inclusive for all workers, communities and countries.

“‘Just transition’ is a transition that entails everyone,” says Caycedo, a Los Angeles-based Colombian artist whose photographs, hanging sculptures, films, books, installations and performances have centered on environmental and social justice themes for over a decade. “‘Now’ speaks to the climate emergency at this historical moment of our planet.”

Participants will be given red shirts to wear for the performance that they can take home afterward. The color red, often associated with emergencies, will stand out prominently against McCarthy Quad’s green grass and cement paths. Drone photography will capture the performance from above, allowing participants to amplify their message on social media later.

Caycedo hopes to attract at least 160 participants — the minimum number needed to create 10-foot letters made up of carefully placed humans. “One of the goals of the geochoreography is to form a diverse, collective body, where all bodies have a role in a position,” Caycedo says.

Allison Agsten, the event’s curator, notes that the embodied aspect of the geochoreography — with people lying head-to-toe and shoulder-to-shoulder — will allow those involved to experience the power of joining forces for a shared goal.

“When we think of an art experience, most of us don’t necessarily think of ourselves as participants — we think of ourselves as onlookers,” says Agsten, director of the USC Annenberg Center for Climate Journalism and Communication and curator at USC Wrigley. “This is an invitation to not just stand on the sidelines, but to get in there and be part of the group and do the work together.”

“Carolina Caycedo is an incredible multidisciplinary artist who shares Visions and Voices’ commitment to building community and exploring societal issues through the arts, and we are so glad that we can help bring her to USC,” says Daria Yudacufski, executive director of USC Visions and Voices, a universitywide arts and humanities initiative. “Her participatory performance will bring communities together in an immersive and interactive way, and I know it will provide a powerful and meaningful experience for the participants.”

Grassroots leaders unite

The noon geochoreography will be preceded by a panel discussion on just energy transition held at 10 a.m. in the University Park Campus’ Salvatori Computer Science Center. Both activities are part of a much larger project spearheaded by Caycedo called We Place Life at the Center. Presented by The Getty’s arts initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide, it involves an exhibition, publication and educational programs that highlight ecological movements and the processes that have informed them.

“The project aims to broaden what we understand as an energy transition,” Caycedo says. She notes that a holistic transition should entail not just the phaseout of fossil fuels but also sustainable water and land stewardship, food-system changes and ecosystem restoration guided by Indigenous people’s knowledge.

El Respiro / Respire will serve as part of the closing of the traveling exhibition We Place Life at the Center / Situamos la vida en el centro, which opened at the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College on Sept. 28, 2024. Caycedo assembled works with a group of artists and environmentalists from the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean.

“These people are on the front lines from a grassroots and community perspective, embodying transition projects and processes in their communities,” Caycedo says.

More than 30 of these artists and activists will convene for a retreat at the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island in the four days preceding El Respiro / Respire. Caycedo conceived the retreat as not only a summit for knowledge exchange but a chance for the cohort to pause, reflect and recharge. She chose the name El Respiro / Respire to represent a collective exhale — “a moment where you take a deep breath and kind of gain and regain strength for the long-term struggle,” she says.

At the close of the retreat, the group will travel to the University Park Campus to participate in the geochoreography and panel discussion moderated by Agsten. Caycedo will be in conversation with Juan De Lara, associate professor of American studies and ethnicity at USC Dornsife and director of the Center for Latinx and Latin American Studies; Camila Marambio, a Chilean curator and founder of Ensayos, a collective research practice focused on eco-cultural conservation in Tierra del Fuego; and Barbara Santos, a Colombian artist and researcher whose work in Amazonian jungles blends art, technology and ancestral knowledge.

“El Respiro / Respire is a really special opportunity for our community at USC to be able to engage with this group of leaders in a direct way,” Agsten says.

Jennifer West, professor of practice of fine art and director of the MFA in art at USC Roski, has been following Caycedo’s work since she evaluated Caycedo’s MFA thesis in 2014. Within the international art community, Caycedo has become “one of the leading figures in thinking about the environment and indigenous rights,” West says.

She believes El Respiro / Respire is an example of how Caycedo’s artistic practice has evolved over the past decade. “She’s gotten more interested in working communally,” West says. “This is what’s really beautiful about what she’s doing — she’s not just pointing out problems but offering art as a cathartic way to come together around ideas.”

Trojan Family values

Caycedo hopes that grounding the event at USC, an R1 research university, will invite new connections between scholarly and community efforts toward energy transition.

“This project is all about nurturing networks of solidarity and making a call to the academic community to join these networks of solidarity,” she says.

During the geochoreography, she plans to use USC’s Unifying Values — integrity; excellence; diversity, equity and inclusion; well-being; open communication; and accountability — as a springboard to help participants reflect on the collective action and write captions to accompany the drone photograph on social media.

“While people are in position writing with their bodies, I will be prompting them to think about, ‘What is the relationship you’re developing with this place?’ — not only with the campus, but with the neighborhood and with the city at large, and with the natural systems that sustain us daily,” Caycedo says. “We want to use the USC core values to prompt these thoughts and these reflections.”

Returning to the campus where she earned her Master of Fine Arts degree is meaningful for Caycedo, who credits her time at USC Roski with making her a better artist and introducing her to the cultural fabric of Los Angeles. While pursuing her degree, she became interested in the cause that inspired her first geochoreography in 2014: protesting the construction of a hydroelectric dam over the Yuma (Magdalena) River in an area of Colombia where Caycedo spent many years of her childhood.

Since then, her artistic focus has been to spotlight vulnerable communities and fragile ecosystems affected by large-scale energy infrastructure. In addition to her collaborative fieldwork, Caycedo has exhibited her studio art at such high-profile venues as New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney Biennial.

Yet she has no plans to exhibit the drone image generated at El Respiro / Respire. “My intention is not to print this image and then put it in a museum,” Caycedo says. “The intention is to recirculate it as much as possible, so that this message of just transition also circulates as much as possible.”