Searching for Ghosts of the Gulf

By Brandon Ballengée, Ph.D.
Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana

An ongoing art, activism, and science investigation with Gulf of Mexico communities

Life is the most exceptional form of poetry, albeit complicated, messy, fragile, and quickly dwindling. Biodiversity is nature’s art. What will become of this art as we continue to extinguish life in the name of monetary growth?

My continuing project, Searching for Ghosts of the Gulf, responds to missing Gulf of Mexico species through visual artworks and collaborative actions with coastal communities that are themselves culturally endangered.

For many of us, and more than 10,000 other species, the Gulf of Mexico is a special place, our sanctuary, our home, our mother, provider, and sometimes destroyer. As an artist, I find her to be an inspirational source of color, form, intrigue, tranquility, and fear. From the science side, the Gulf is one of the most biologically productive marine environments and home to numerous endemic organisms, including 77 fishes found nowhere else in the world.

The Gulf is resilient, powerful, seductive, but also dangerous, damaged, and suffocating in her own sang noir (a regional term describing crude oil). 2020 marked the 10-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill, the largest known petrochemical spill by volume in human history. At the same time, land in coastal Louisiana is being lost at the fastest rate on Earth and, in recent decades, several Gulf species have gone missing. As habitats and biodiversity disappear, so do the cultures that rely on them. The fate of the Gulf’s children remains precarious.

The Art and Actions of Response

Since the DWH oil spill, much of my art and research science has focused on the perilous state of Gulf of Mexico communities. Even 10 years after DWH, the long-term impact on Gulf fishes, other biota, and Gulf ecosystems is still not well understood. Additionally, there have been more than 2,000 smaller spills since DWH and, before then, the Taylor, or MC20, oil spill began in 2004 and continues today. Through my installations, photographs, crude paintings, and programs, I want to give visual form to these environmental insults and inspire individual actions toward systemic change.

During the DWH spill, I collected thousands of dead specimens from Louisiana beaches. These were preserved and many of them were later utilized to create the monumental installation Collapse (2010–12). A subset of these specimens was chemically cleared and stained, then made into the initial Ghosts of the Gulf photographic series in 2014.

Searching for Ghosts of the Gulf is my ongoing interdisciplinary art and environmental advocacy project seeking to portray absent biodiversity and activate coastal residents through three intertwined components:

• Portraying drawing, photographing, and radiographing missing and rare species
• Activating coastal communities through participatory citizen science and art field-based programs
• Exhibiting works in pop-up exhibitions in unconventional venues

Portraying

In 2016, I was part of an interdisciplinary Louisiana State University research team, which found that 14 endemic Gulf fish species had not been reported following the DWH spill. Even prior to the spill, several Gulf fishes remained elusive and had not been found in decades (1950 through 2005). Little is known about these species and the only records we have of their existence are a handful of preserved specimens scattered among natural history collections. As an artist and biologist, I am inspired to portray and to tirelessly search for these Ghosts.

In response, I create portraits of these missing species, which I refer to as Ghosts of the Gulf, as a way to give form to each of them. The Ghosts are drawn from historic specimens in the Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute’s (TUBRI’s) Suttkus

Fish Collection (the second-largest preserved fish collection in the world), located in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, and others I photographed and radiographed as a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (the largest fish collection in the world) in Washington, D.C.

Some portraits are printed radiographs while others are “oil paintings” using solidified DWH “tar balls” collected from Gulf beaches or from “fresh” crude oil from the Taylor spill. These Ghosts intend to convey mystery as well as melancholy, as a means of engaging audiences in introspective contemplation, asking what is lost from our collective treatment of the Gulf.

Activating

Coastal Louisiana’s economy strongly relies on its fisheries and the oil industry, both of which have become increasingly unstable in recent decades. Rising seas, coastal erosion, sediment diversions, and multiple oil spills have depleted fish populations and devastated oyster farming. What is happening to coastal ecosystems is happening to us—we are intertwined, and it takes art to show us.

To activate coastal communities, I lead Eco-Actions, artistic and environmental inquiries into socio-ecological stressors facing our coast. For these, residents join me in conducting ecological field sampling in disappearing marshland habitats, while making their own art envisioning future scenarios where their communities will adapt and survive. Likewise, I learn from these residents about their knowledge of the Gulf and her species. The Eco-Actions focus on missing Gulf species, land, and habitats, while exploring loss of coastal culture.

Fundamentally, these programs are intended to build resilience as they connect human to non-human communities, improve knowledge of local ecosystems, and provide strategies for expressing these findings with others through art. My underlying idea is that by examining complicated socio-ecological issues, grounded in scientific facts, through the lens of art, participants may brainstorm solutions and begin to take creative actions toward positive changes.

Exhibiting

To share these works, pop-up exhibitions are set up in unconventional venues such as marinas, seafood markets, parks, libraries, festivals, and other places where fisherfolk, oilfield workers, and their families gather. Art works as an “olive branch” with fisherfolk and oilfield workers, many of whom remain resistant to the concept of human-caused environmental impact, yet who are the population faced with the greatest threats to their culture and livelihoods. Through these pop-up exhibitions, I am able to meet and recruit potential project participants, communicate my environmental concerns, and learn about their perspectives, while brainstorming creative ideas toward survival.

Conclusion

As an artist, I continue to develop an aesthetic of “loss,” giving visual form to the growing absence of biodiversity on our planet. As a scientist, I find it increasingly important to share research findings about such losses with the public. Combined, art and science are complementary ways of trying to understand our world and ourselves, as well as a means to express and pragmatically address the complex socio-ecological challenges we and other species currently face. Perhaps with good fortune we may find some of the Gulf’s lost children and save our home.

Excerpt from Brandon Ballengée’s working notes dated July 6, 2021, as part of his 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Written at “The end of the world” in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.