WILLING EFFORT — STATEMENT
︎︎
Willing Effort was a collaborative project that started in the Anthropocene classroom a course taught by Andrew Yang and Jeremy Bolen at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Our class was asked to create artwork for The Center for Humans & Nature’s Journal Minding Nature. Willing Effort formed when collaborators Cielo Saucedo, Nicolas Muratore, Dann Disciglio, and Travis Mitzel decided to create work to discuss and encourage new and novel ecology. Using the great lakes system as a case study, we considered what possibilities this region’s ecosystem held. Through human care and stewardship, can we create a more biodiverse ecosystem instead of succumbing to the narrative that alien species will kill and destroy their new territories? Can we begin to tell new eco-mythologies now that we have entered the Anthropocene? The stories of old seem to no longer apply.