Christa Donner: Dear Human

A multi-sensory walk through Chicago’s West Ridge Nature Park, activating messages from non-human residents: a deer tick, a mulberry tree, and others. Bring your smartphone and headphones for an immersive experience merging narration with the existing soundscape through site-specific prompts to listen, touch, and find your place within the local ecology.

This project is made possible through the Roman Susan Art Foundation. Risograph printed booklets of Donner’s map/drawing and narration will be distributed during the opening event, and will be available as a downloadable PDF at romansusan.org/dear-human to be accessible whenever the park is open.

The land that is now the West Ridge Nature Park served as a dumping ground for debris as part of one of Chicago’s oldest cemeteries. During its renovation as a public park in 2013, artifacts revealed it to be part of an enormous precolonial Native American village, and a center for trade, travel, and healing for tribes including the Potowatami, Miami, Kickapoo, and many others.