November 2025
PLA, epoxy, wood, cord
72” x 48”

The Fire Ant’s Survival Guide to the Disturbed Ecosystem (Chapter 5: Floods) centers on the rafting behavior of fire ants during times of flood. In this instinctive act of collective survival, the ants interlock their bodies to form a buoyant, living vessel. The raft becomes a lens through which to examine the ecological and political precarity of a world shaped by rising waters, displacement, and the climate crisis. The work draws on the “Fire Ant Wars,” a decades-long USDA effort to eradicate fire ant populations in the American South. These efforts, framed as battles for ecological purity and agricultural protection, ultimately had the opposite effect. Changing land-use practices and increasingly volatile flood cycles carried colonies downstream, while eradication efforts removed competitors and destabilized already stressed ecosystems. Within this context, the raft becomes a symbol of how disturbance creates new ecological possibilities, and how resilience takes shape inside systems continually reshaped by human intervention. Though connected to an in-progress survival guide, The Fire Ant’s Survival Guide to the Disturbed Ecosystem, written by the fire ants themselves, the raft asks what forms of collective endurance become possible in landscapes shaped by crisis, resistance, and the consequences of the climate crisis.