We Refuse to Die was part of the exhibition, Unsettling Matter: Gaining Ground, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, August 2023 - January 2024.
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Video: Introducing 'We Refuse to Die'

Posted
August 9, 2023

Over the summer, driving a U-Haul full of Externality carvings and masks, we had the opportunity to visit with frontline community members in the Gulf South and Appalachia who are leading fights to stop the fossil fuel and petrochemical poisoning of our communities, lands, and waters.

In this video you'll hear reflections from some of the folks we met in Port Arthur (TX), the site of the largest oil and gas refineries in the US; St. James Parish (LA), where community members are successfully delaying Formosa Plastics's plans to build a multi-billion dollar petrochemical plant; Clairton (PA), home to the largest coal processing plant in the nation; and East Palestine (OH), where a recent train derailment caused one of the worst chemical disasters in American history.

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about the artists

Not An Alternative (est. 2004) is a collective that works at the intersection of art, activism, and critical theory. We have a mission to affect popular understandings of histories, symbols, and institutions. Our projects have taken place in museums nationally and internationally, including Guggenheim, PS1/MOMA, Queens Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Museo del Arte Moderno, and our work was cited in The New York Times and ArtNet’s “Best in Art in 2015” round-ups.

Not An Alternative’s latest, ongoing project is The Natural History Museum (NHM, 2014—), a pop-up museum that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature, yet are excluded from traditional natural history museums. As a “Trojan horse” strategy, NHM aims not only to critique the museum sector as it exists but also to transform it into a vital infrastructure for environmental struggle. NHM operates in a range of venues, including art museums, our mobile museum bus, major conventions for museum professionals, and within traditional natural history museums. NHM collaborates with artists, community groups, scientists, and museum professionals to create new narratives about our shared history and future, with the goal of educating the public, measurably influencing public opinion, and inspiring collective action.