Contributor

Amy Balkin is an artist whose works propose alternatives for conceiving the public domain outside current legal and discursive systems, addressing property relations, environmental justice, and equity in the context of climate change. A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting is a growing collection of items contributed by people living in places that may disappear (or already are) owing to the physical, political, and economic impacts of climate change, including sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and desertification. Organized into "common but differentiated” collections, contributed objects together form a record of community-gathered evidence, and an archive of the future anterior—what will have been. The archive operates from the principle that any item is equally valuable as a record of present or projected future disappearance of a place, as chosen by someone there. It can be anything that happens to be there, including detritus, flotsam, or jetsam. As of 2019, the archive contains contributions from Anvers Island (Antarctica), Cape Verde, Greenland, Kivalina (Alaska), Nepal, New Orleans, Panama, Peru, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, and Tuvalu.