Displaced #2 – Destination USA
DISPLACED – USA
Evocative stories of people who have to leave their homes due to climate change.
After many trips for our project from July to September, we mainly used October to evaluate the material we had collected. Transcribing and translating interviews, editing and processing images and cutting the first videos. Just in time for COP 29 in Baku, we delivered the first stories from Senegal, the USA and Brazil to the IOM this week in the form of portraits, landscape images and videos. It didn’t take long and we got an enthusiastic feedback from the UN headquarters in Geneva. It is planned to show these first works at the climate conference in November as a preview of next year’s major exhibition at COP 30 in Brazil.
Another important milestone for this project, but also for future work, is the founding of our Visual Impact Projects association last Sunday in order to expand our funding opportunities. The association currently only has 2 members, but this is likely to change.
We were pretty overwhelmed by the feedback on our first project update. Thank you very much! Some of you have already asked for our account number to support us financially which we really appreciated. At the moment, however, it is important for us getting in touch with suitable institutions. We have not yet received any new commitments since October 15 and are still $160,000 short in funding. But we are in contact with several foundations and hope to be able to report better news to you soon.
Best regards & see you soon
Mathias & Monika
BRASCHLER/FISCHER
braschlerfischer.com
+41 79 205 0330
Displaced – Destination USA, July 2024
Our trip to the USA in July was no less adventurous than our journey to Senegal. On the contrary… We spent 20 days in the US and started in the far west, in Greenville, a small town in the Sierra Nevada, around 400 km north-east of San Francisco. The town gained unintentional notoriety when it was hit by the Dixie Fire on August 4, 2021 and burned to the ground in a very short time. The Dixie Fire was the second largest wildfire California has ever experienced. Almost 4000 km² burned, which corresponds to 80% of the canton of Valais. When Greenville was hit by the fire, it took less than an hour for the town to be completely destroyed, which meant that most people could only save themselves and lost all their belongings. The community is slowly rebuilding, but most of the approximately 1500 residents are now scattered throughout the region or have even moved away from California.
In Susanville, about an hour’s drive away, we met Patti and Otto Brackett in a retirement home. Before the fire, they had a stately home in Greenville, with dogs and several horses. They lost everything except their animals. Before the fire, they had never dreamed of moving into a retirement home, but after the fire they could no longer muster the energy to rebuild everything.
Even more surprising was that we met Sue, a former private secretary to Mother Theresa, in Greenville. Her hobby is playing Fortnite! Which she did enthusiastically with Elias. She also lost everything she owned, but had just moved into a new house in the town the week we were there. We had the honor of being her first guests in her new home.
We experienced what a permanent danger fire has become in California when a new wildfire broke out during our stay just 100 km from Greenville. For some, this brought back the trauma of the loss they had suffered, which manifested itself in a tearful interview with Rosa, who had lost the house in which she had raised her children.
After a week, we made our way to Las Vegas to fly from there to Houston. And in doing so, we had our own experiences with the changing climate. An incredible heatwave swept across the Southwest of the USA. When we crossed Death Valley, the temperature there was an incredible 53 C, one of the highest temperatures ever recorded in the hottest place in the US! Nevertheless, we went for a short walk in a dune landscape. However, after a quarter of an hour we had to flee back into the car – it was simply too hot.
But even in Las Vegas, the heat didn’t get much better. The temperature there also rose to 48 C, a new heat record for the casino city. Even at night, the thermometer only dropped just slightly below 40 C. It was the most extreme heatwave we had ever experienced, and it was actually only manageable thanks to the omnipresent air conditioning in the USA. When we wanted to make our way to Houston, climate change threw another spanner in the works: when we arrived at the airport by cab (our rental car had given up the ghost in the heat), we received a text message, informing us that our flight to Texas had been canceled because Hurricane Beryl had paralyzed the city a few hours earlier. Finding an alternative flight turned out to be difficult, as countless flights were canceled. It was only thanks to Monika’s persistence at the airport that she was finally able to secure us a flight – but not for another 3 days. To Elias’ delight, this left us with no choice but to stay in a casino and get to know Vegas better.
When we finally landed in Texas, we quickly realized that the hurricane had indeed left behind quite some destruction. As we arrived in the late afternoon, we wanted to spend the night in Houston and then continue our journey to Louisiana. We were quite surprised when we realized that our hotel had been converted into an emergency shelter for hurricane victims. Which, however, had no electricity, like most of the big city in Texas. Finding another hotel turned out to be a big challenge, just as it was almost impossible to find somewhere to eat. We left the city in the dark and actually had to drive for two hours before we finally found an open McDonalds. The bland McDonald’s burgers had never tasted better! Finding a hotel was also a Herculean task, as many people had left the Texan metropolis to stay somewhere where there was still electricity.
Of course, these adversities could not have been more fitting as we had come to the Gulf of Mexico to meet people who had lost their homes due to hurricanes.
Cameron is a town that is a good example of this. Located in Louisiana on the Gulf, it was hit by two major hurricanes within two months in 2020 and got largely destroyed. Of the 2000 inhabitants before, only around 10% still live in the town today. Tressie, who grew up in Cameron and owned a restaurant there, also lost her home and restaurant when Hurricane Laura made landfall as a Category 4 storm (wind speeds of up to 240 km/h). Today, she lives one hour away in a trailer park in Lake Charles, but still comes to Cameron every day, where she now feeds people fantastic Cajun food from a food truck. She can’t imagine rebuilding. The fear of losing everything again in the next hurricane is too great. And the question is not whether it will come, but only when.
