KACIE FAITH KRESS & ISABELLE SENECHAL
Photo by KACIE FAITH KRESS.
MILWAUKEE – A young man sits in a brightly decorated nursery, sweating profusely as he fiddles with a broken air conditioner. Nearby, an older woman paces in the wreckage of a flooded home, sifting through water-stained insurance statements and broken picture frames.
Outside, people pause to take photos of the catastrophe scenes.
The rooms are part of a protest art installation called Danger Season, designed to raise awareness about the impact of climate change during the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
The interactive exhibit was sponsored by two environmental advocacy groups – Climate Power and Extreme Weather Survivors – to raise awareness to climate change and protest potential plans by Republicans to reinvest in fossil fuels and undo environmental regulations enacted in the last four years.
“We set up the installation here to be able to help people visualize what could be happening, what will be happening and what is happening in the climate crisis around the world,” said state Sen. Chris Larson, a Milwaukee Democrat and board member of Climate Power. “Here in Wisconsin, we have had a higher number of thunderstorms, tornado warnings and mass flooding than normal. So the impacts of this are very real.”
The climate justice groups tapped artists affiliated with M ss ng P eces (Missing Pieces), a production company based in New York and Los Angeles, to create the immersive art display within sight of the RNC.
Three blocks from Fiserv Forum, Danger Season occupies six-windows in the historic Germania Building, which housed Milwaukee’s largest German language news publication in the early twentieth century. During World War I, anti-German sentiment in Milwaukee sparked massive protests outside the building.
Creative director Annie Saunders said that Danger Season was, “conceived and designed to bring to the doorstep of the RNC something that they are trying to ignore and deny.”
The diorama-style rooms that light up at night depict scenes of extreme weather damage in homes inspired by testimonies from survivors of natural disasters. The first window, facing West Wells Street, shows a child’s nursery, fully decorated in pastel shades. Harsh red light pours in through a window. The toys, wallpaper and ceiling fan are melting.
The next two windows connect. A conference room is littered with loose papers and files. At its center, four businessmen sit around a table, their heads literally buried in a mountain of sand. Above them, a TV plays scenes of severe weather filmed by actual survivors, the broadcast cutting out occasionally. Adjacent is a room full of filing cabinets that have fallen apart, out of which black, tarry oil is spilling.
In the last two windows, there is a flood-wracked living-room with destroyed furniture, art, photos, a damaged TV and personal items.
For the first two days of the RNC, three live actors, who ranged in ethnicity and age from from 21 to 58, rotated in 20-minute intervals between the “heat room” and the “flood room,” acting out the real-life struggles of surviving extreme weather events. The diverse casting was an intentional decision by Saunders and her team, Saunders explained, to show that extreme weather can “happen to anyone and…will happen to everyone.”
Zabdiel Pozos, 21, one of the Milwaukee actors involved in the protest performance, said the flood room in particular hit close to home. Before immigrating to the United States from Nicragua in 2008, Pozo’s childhood home was flooded during a tropical storm.
“It’s a terrifying feeling, you know, seeing your house fill up. Seeing all your belongings trashed. It’s so sad,” Pozos said.
Extreme Weather Survivors co-founder and executive director Sierra Kos said that the art aims to “turn pain into power through trauma-informed storytelling.” Kos connected Saunders with survivors of flooding, fires and heatwaves, whose experiences inspired the scenes depicted in the window displays.
The building and putting together of the set occurred in only four days, beginning last Thursday and going live on the convention’s first day Monday.
Regardless of political affiliation, the creators of Danger Season hope that their protest art will evoke a sense of human togetherness as viewers reckon with the reality of climate change.
Climate change is "coming for every single one of us. You can't run from it with your money. You can't run from it with your geography. You can't run from it with your politics,” said Saunders. “We're together after all.”
Photo by ISABELLE SENECHAL.
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