Octopi Wall Street

By Modje Taavon | Editor of Articulate—a new graduate student journal of Literature and Rhetoric studies at Cal-State University, Northridge.

An excerpt from Octopi Wall Street will be published in the forthcoming special inaugural edition.

What prompted you to write Octopi Wall Street?
I read an article by Donna Haraway ("Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, " E-Flux Journal #75, September 2016) that raised the issue of the affects of climate change on other non-human species. That idea piqued my interest and I began to read other articles about the offbeat effects of climate change. But rather than present the results of the research from only a human perspective, it seemed illustrative to present the offbeat effects of climate change in an equally offbeat manner.

What was the most “offbeat” effect you researched?
I’d say it was the Swiss glacier, Tsanfleuron, that, like other glaciers, is melting but as it melts it is giving up the dead bodies of

Playwright Karen Casady spotted the original cartoon that inspired the play Octopi Wall Street in an article by Donna Haraway (“Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”, E-Flux Journal #75, September 2016) that raised the issue of the affects of climate change on other non-human species. The cartoon’s design and artwork was created in 2011 by graduate students Marley Jarvis, Laurel Hiebert and Kira Treibergs and appeared on t-shirts and totebags with proceeds benefiting the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology and the Charleston Marine Life Center. We are using the art with their permission and thank them very much! It appears abundantly on our promotional materials.

Octopi Wall Street addresses the subject of climate change through a series of vignettes told from the perspective of both human and non-human entities (think drunk birds, drag queen barley, algae and a glacier). The play is based on extensive research of main stream media articles dealing with off-be