The Atlantean Series: Refuge is a collaboration between La Techxicana Studio and Ms. Begoña De Ubieta leading YWLA Fine Arts students through an exploration of natural dyes and creative reuse of everyday single-use plastics to create a Tejana Futurist tent encampment outpost of the mythical Atlantis in response to local and global climate indicators and displacement. Within this refuge, we seek solutions from natural and domestic items around us creating together by hand to grapple with how to slow down our mass consuming ways that perpetuate environmental crisis.
The Atlantean Series: Refuge premiered October 19, 2024 as part of Luminaria Comtemporary Arts Festival on the Eastside at VIA's Robert Thompson Transit Terminal Walkway near St. Paul's Square. The two tent encampment activated a non-traditional installation space because climate change related events change our entire realities, including our concepts of safety, shelter, community, and wealth. The tents exteriors were sewn with fabric panel works of reclaimed cotton sheet dyed with local dyes of osage, marigold, passionvine, and yellow onion, plus indigo to bring ocean and algae blues and greens. These botanicals carry cultural tradition or historical emotional weight, bring home cooked comfort, or grow invasive vines. Within the camping tents, the audience could rest on recrafted gathering cots, cushions, and pillows amongst single use plastic refuse, some of which were repurposed into ceiling lighting referencing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch plastic islands and some dumped after refreshment. Plarn sea turtles clustered like bleached coral warning lights or bioluminescence along the tent floors. Pillows spilled tangled dyed strips like Gulf sargassum. Within a sparse setting of displacement, the familiar became futuristic dystopic tapestry, while also not denying its more pedestrian function.