Sculpture
Black River is a sculpture that creates a narrative of displacement and yearning for a homeland. Within this work is an Inflatable Crocodile that acts as a puppet, positioned to be singing a song about its life through karaoke. It has no voice but is implied to forever tell its story in an unending loop.
This installation aims to imbue human qualities to a fictional creature that grew up in a twisted environment, to recall from the viewer a sense of empathy and question our memories towards connection with land.
It is an investigation towards shifting baselines, or the way in which people perceive the environment and their habitat. Where in a world with declining ecosystems, every successive generation experiences the natural world at different points of decline. In this story the crocodile yearns for its destroyed land, dwelling within the climate apocalypse somehow displaced far from its toxic swamp.
Jose Macasinag 