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“Bloom”, a short animated film, is a meditation on hope during a time of societal & ecological crisis. It was made entirely with paper scraps, photographic material, and bits of scavenged trash in the artist’s Queens apartment during the 2020-2021 pandemic.
You and I exist on a precipice. We are witnesses to, and participants in, a fundamental reordering of the very environment that created us. Day by day, meal by meal, car trip by car trip, purchase by purchase, we are unintentionally mining elements that have been locked deep inside the crust of the earth for millennia, chemically altering them, and pumping them into the very air we breathe and water we drink.
From an individual human perspective, these shifts appear slow and inconsequential. But from a geologic perspective, these changes are akin to an asteroid hitting the earth. Since 1950, human activities have essentially doubled the amount of heat-trapping gasses in our planet’s atmosphere, shattering every record that exists for 650,000 years. A single empty potato chip bag, having served its use for mere minutes, will go on to last longer than the pyramids—ultimately breaking down into billions of tiny micro plastics that are consumed by fish and birds and are already being found in human placentas.
For me, it is heartening to know that some of the very first living organisms on the planet produced oxygen as a waste product. By poisoning their own atmosphere, they created the ideal conditions for other organisms—including humans—to evolve. I like to imagine the super-organisms that might flourish in some fantastical future, thriving on the plastic waste and greenhouse gasses that we generated.
Life’s relentless compulsion to invent and evolve—responsible for both the novel coronavirus that so recently ravaged the globe, and for the vaccine that was developed just as quickly—will carry us into the future. It will continue to plumb the cracks and fissures, to capitalize on opportunity, to seek out the edges of what we think is possible and push the needle just a bit further. All of us get to decide what role we want to play in this—which way we want the needle to go.
–Chandra Bocci, 2021
This project was made possible in part by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with New York City Council.
Sound by Jesse Durost: www.jessedurost.com