“THE SCREAMS OF THE EARTH”/“LOS GRITOS DE LA TIERRA,” reads a billboard standing in one of many venues around Los Angeles in time for the Ninth Summit of the Americas. As part of the Los Angeles run of HURT EARTH, this billboard and other striking public art installations by US artist Jenny Holzer are set to ‘greet’ the leaders who are meeting for the Summit.
Guerilla projections at different sites in Los Angeles feature testimonies for climate action, running from June 4–7 and June 9–11. One of the billboards displays climate poetry originally published in the Agam Agenda’s anthology, Harvest Moon: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis: a line from the poem “Cuando todo acabe” (“When Everything Ends”) by Costa Rican poet and activist Shirley Campbell Barr.
The HURT EARTH installations feature excerpts of testimonies to the climate crisis as experienced by peoples of the 55-member nation Climate Vulnerable Forum and other groups. It ran previously as light projections and street hubs across the UK to demand urgent climate action at COP26 and beyond.
The creative installations have now traveled to Los Angeles in similar hopes of disruption: the Ninth Summit of the Americas, the which convenes only every few years, gathers foreign leaders in the region in order to tackle critical shared challenges such as migration and climate change. The Summit has been facing public criticism with regard to the host country’s guest list. It is considered a prime opportunity for the region’s leaders to deliver on long-overdue promises on climate action to their constituents, particularly those living in vulnerable countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
HURT EARTH LA will remind attending leaders of the “screams of the earth,” which can no longer be ignored by any country or citizen. More of these creative calls for climate action and hope, including Shirley Campbell Barr’s featured poem, may be read in Harvest Moon: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis, an anthology of more than 30 images and over 30 poems, stories, and essays.
