// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

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Brian Mackey: It's the 21st show. I'm Brian Mackey. Every summer in the week leading up to Labor Day, a city blooms in the Nevada desert. Artists, musicians, and seekers of all kinds come together for Burning Man, an event whose guiding principles include decommodification, communal effort, participation, and radical self-reliance. Now, people coming to Burning Man are encouraged to create art on the playa as gifts to the community. And this year, one of those gifts includes Octopolis, a 20-ft.-tall sculpture made from, among other things, salvaged metal and reclaimed fabric. This desert cephalopod is the idea and work product of an Illinois woman and her sister. Adina Rivas is an interdisciplinary artist. She's also founder of the Creative Reuse Marketplace, a nonprofit based in Springfield. And when she's not doing that, she works for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. Adina, welcome to the 21st show. Thanks for being with us.

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Adina Rivas: Thanks, Brian, for having us.

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Brian Mackey: And her sister Lena Joy Rivas is an artist based in Clear Lake Oaks in Northern California. That's where she created the retreat, Ravens' Landing, which, after being largely destroyed by a wildfire, has been built anew and rechristened Ravens' Haven. Lena's already in the desert getting ready for Burning Man, but she was still able to connect with us this morning. Lena, thank you for being here as well.

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Lena Joy Rivas: Thank you. Um, it's actually Ravens' Landing. It

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Brian Mackey: was, oh, Ravens' Landing, my mistake. I got them backwards.

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Lena Joy Rivas: All geniuses are dyslexic.

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Brian Mackey: I'll take it. 800-222-9455 if you want to join us. Maybe you've been to Burning Man in the past. We'd love to hear your story. 800-222-9455. And Adina, I'm gonna start with you. Just describe for us what Octopolis is going to look like.

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Adina Rivas: Uh, so, so from this side over here, we're, we're creating the skin of a 25-ft. sculpture, a 20-foot octopus, right? So it's 5 ft. up off the ground. The skin, try to think of a hot air balloon, right? The panels that come down on a hot air balloon are called gores. And there's 10 of them. There's 4 that are 25 ft. high, um, and then there's 6 that are 19 ft. as far as the length of the fabric anyways, it'll be cut down once we get there and we'll kind of mess around with it. And then you have some fabric coming down off the head into the 8 arms, about 4 ft. or so. So, basically, the gore is to give it this upcycled, reclaimed, you know, things come from something else and, you know, life has life after life after life after life.

This project literally represents a lot of different and has a lot of different symbolism in it, you know, we did scrap type materials and so going up the middle of each one of these mega panels, these gores is these smaller panels that have taken months to create. There's hundreds of them, and they're made out of small pieces of fabric that local people here in Springfield and surrounding areas, Sangam[on] and Menard County have been donating to the Creative Reuse over the years, and we've kind of like scooped them all together and we've been ripping them, we've been sewing them. And we've been incorporating them into these basically bed sheets that were donated through hotels locally and then created into these very beautiful, um, kind of wavy skin type. The idea is to kind of mimic the idea of an octopus skin. It has a lot of different layers and textures and it can change almost instantly as far as the design, the patterns, the color, and all this and that. And so we made it on the spectrum of white because the [a] dust, it basically, it'll get covered in the dust and it'll kind of disappear and that's what octopuses do, right? They totally blend into their surroundings and so we want people to walk up to it and be like, oh my gosh, and they're just like, boom, a 25-ft. sculpture, you know what I mean, like a 20-ft. octopus standing in front of them like, oh my God.

And so the skin is a big part of it, um, but like another huge part is, is when those arms, that skin comes off the head into the arms, the arms are gonna bust through the fabric and then you see this beautifully gorgeous filigree type metal that's been welded, um, and to kind of remind you of like where this whole thing is going it's not just here on the playa it's not getting burned, but it has this life after life after life which my sister can totally speak to and

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Brian Mackey: we're gonna get to that

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Adina Rivas: this was her think tank.

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Brian Mackey: Well,

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Adina Rivas: yeah,

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Brian Mackey: so let me, let me bring, let me bring Lena into the conversation from, from the playa. Uh, let's first tell me, I guess, where did the idea for this come from.

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Lena Joy Rivas: Oh, I don't know. My sister's so good at advocating for this project. She said very plainly, yeah, spoken. Um, so the, the idea was, OK, when I was a child, I, I saw an artist put, uh, art into the ocean. And there's something that kind of went off that was like, oh, someday I would love to do that. I didn't know how or when or where or why even, but as I got older, I realized that a big calling of mine is conservation work and merging the creativity with conservation and joy and such that as Ravens' Landing and to attest to all that, but people can get away from the city and connect to nature and so with art and big art and conservation, it's just such a daunting idea of like how do we help with this, yeah, the, all the efforts in the world and as an artist, you know, you're always kind of like, yeah, how, how do we do anything and art can be so consumable and wasteful. So for me, sustainability is a huge thing and, and what does sustainable look like and so it is, it's taking all of our resources, putting it back together and putting it back into projects and a big thing about this project is the sustainable part of gathering resources from all over, such as the skin.

Um, a big part of the, um, of her is reclaimed metal. And that was from another project and another artist, so it's really amazing bringing other artists into this whole project and collaborating with everybody. And yeah, it's really an amazing, remarkable team that's come together for Octopolis and the idea of her came from watching these scientists like working with coral and when they were making these coral, they were using rebar and it was like this thin metal, I'm sure everybody knows what rebar is. They use them in concrete, but it was kind of a round bar and they made these spider looking things that they would put on the floor of the oceans, and they would grow the coral and then they would scuba dive down and actually connect the coral to these bars, basically. And so immediately a brain fart went off and it was like, OK, I can do this, but I can do it bigger and I can do it with art. And what, what animal symbif[ies], you know, the mother of the ocean and oh gosh, I just, yeah, octopuses don't even get me started. They're they're just, they're so incredible.

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Brian Mackey: they're having a moment as well for about a decade now. Yes,

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Lena Joy Rivas: they really are. And you know this year I'm just like, you know, you never know if you're on time with your ideas or, you know, your goals and for some reason I'm just like it is the year of the octopuses and I'm finally on time. So it's all coming and it's all in alignment and it's really beautiful and I think everybody when they they feel the project, they they feel that there's so many facets that is involved with this project. It's not just art, it's not just a conservation project. It's not just anything, it's everything because big art kind of is everything. It brings people together. It makes people care, it makes people have empathy, you know, it shows it gives people validation for their worth, for, I mean, it's just, you can even go on and on the skill sets that people learn and, and it's not just skills, it's, it's communicative skills, it's heart skills, it's mind skills, it's just so many things.

And, and then we all come together in this magical dusty place that is literally trying to kill you every second because it's the environment out here, it literally feel like you're getting shriveled up like a raisin. Um, but the stimulus, and there's something so magical about the action and the activation of humans actually coming together for a higher purpose other than themselves, that is just like there's nothing that can top this. So it's, yeah, being able to do it all and having the organization of Burning Man as well to support this project and everybody involved. Oh, I, I could start naming so many names, but yeah,

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Brian Mackey: let me, let me, yeah, let me take a moment to mention your names again. If people are just tuning in, we're speaking with Lena Joy Rivas and her sister Adina Rivas. Uh, Adina is based in Springfield in central Illinois, uh, works by day for the EPA, but is also the founder of Creative Reuse Marketplace, uh, which is, uh, uh, a nonprofit that sort of takes, uh, upcycled materials, it takes donations of materials, helps people turn them into art, also educates people about, about building, building things uh like this. Um, and she's an interdisciplinary artist. And, uh, Lena is the founder of Ravens' Landing in Clear Lake Oaks in California. Uh, and they are exhibiting Octopolis. I think I said it, uh, maybe a little, uh, incorrectly earlier. So Octopolis in, in, uh, in in Burning Man in the desert. There's a metal skeleton being, uh, that was sort of worked on in California. The skin, the fabric has been uh developed in Springfield that's coming together in the desert.

And, and, uh, Lena, you've been to, I understand, at Burning Man, you know, many times in the past couple of decades. I don't know if this is, if you've been sort of led on a project, I know you've worked on other projects. How has it been? Cause one of the things with Burning Man is you have to be self-sustaining, right? So you gotta bring any welding materials, everything with you, has to come with you. What has it been like organizing this?

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Lena Joy Rivas: Um, it's, yeah, it's a thing you pretty much have to put everything on hold, um, for these big projects, and, but that's, yeah, once you put your mind to something, I think nothing's impossible. So, and as long as you have a good team and people that trust you and you trust them, it just, it flows. [It] flows really beautifully and this I can contest to with this project and how it's already flown and uh yeah, everything's just kind of come together in alignment and uh. But yeah, that's, I've done a lot of big projects out here, so they have helped me immensely and honestly a lot of the design in this project I can pinpoint it back to being inspired by other people's projects, projects I've worked on myself, seeing the things that work, things that don't work, it all kind of, it all [culminates] and comes together. And, and having this piece, it's, it's really neat to kind of actually see some of the, the projects, my past projects and how they've inspired this design and, and the way we're even going to build it as well too. So that's been really, really, really fun.

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Brian Mackey: Adina, so, uh, we mentioned that this project after it, it, it's gonna have a life beyond Burning Man, right? It's gonna go to Santa Fe, to the Rail Yard Park in, in Santa Fe, New Mexico for a while, and eventually, the skin is gonna be removed and the metallic frame's going into the water, as, as Lena said. And the skin, I understand, you're even gonna try and sort of upcycle that, reuse that. Talk to me about the philosophy behind creative reuse.

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Adina Rivas: I think the idea is, so when I was a kid, um, both Lena and I are from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and we were raised there and we're both obviously heavy duty artists. I remember going to a place called Pittsburgh Emporium, and it was just a, a candies, just a kids candy shop for art materials and anything you could think of. And a few years ago, I was looking to do some art. I was inspired by a European artist. They did all this stuff with teeny tiny little pieces of plastics, and I was like, oh I'm going to try that. I'm going to do that. But trying to find stuff like that was very difficult as an artist. I was going to Goodwill, scraping the bottom of barrels, going to the antique shop, that was expensive. Um, and ultimately, you know, it's like, why don't we have something like that here in Springfield that makes art supplies accessible not only to artists, but to teachers and students, to hobbyists, uh, you know, you shouldn't have to spend a fortune to start a project or to create something, you know, either very small or huge, you know, and gigantic. So that's kind of where the Creative [Reuse] is at.

And so when we're looking at stuff and we can have all the stuff in the world in the store, right? And people come in and um it's a [hoarder's organized or crafter's hoarder's organized] paradise, how I like to say it. We can have all the stuff in the world, uh, organized in the categories, but if we don't give people examples of how to reuse this stuff, right? So we try to put examples up on the wall and show, hey, this is how you can do this, I can do that. We do, like you mentioned, we do workshops, we do educational stuff. We have school programming that looks to use artwork to help with social-emotional learning growth. Um, we're gonna be expanding that to adults. We do a lot of stuff, but at the core of it it's still always that center point of reclaiming stuff and upcycling it, reusing it, purposing it and a hard thing about an upcycling artist though is to always think about, OK, I'm gonna reuse this, but now am I turning something that is actually maybe possibly recyclable or reusable in a different way into something that is no longer and basically has a dead life and so that's the cool thing about [Octopolis's] skin is that it doesn't end at Burning Man, right?

That skin will be taken off and hopefully, you know, the, the second, the, the big art continuation of the story is, you know, you have the mother, uh, Mother Earth, you couldn't get more grounded than an Octopolis, you know, the, the ocean floor and then you have Father Sky and that hopefully will be a raven. So you can imagine using the skin as a raven part of the body, it'll be like dyed black or portions of blue and purple and then black and what have you, and then made into wings, of course I'm sure the people here that have done a lot of the quilting, huge shout out to Martha Aldridge and her mother Mary, um, that, you know, they don't really want to see that skin back anytime soon. It's been an enormous amount of work, um, but to keep it moving forward, to keep it going into other art projects, and then how can we kind of keep, keep on reusing it and maybe one day, literally that skin then gets torn up and it becomes artwork itself that goes onto a wall and gets passed down and it gets turned into something else.

I think we forget that absolutely everything, including a single thread, has a life. It has a story. And it's a wild story at times. If you were to follow that single thread, what does it go into? What does it become? What does it end up? And even when it ends up in quote unquote a landfill, where does it go then? It has to go into something, right? Life onto life onto life onto life, and so this is the Creative [Reuse].

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Brian Mackey: I love it. Adina Rivas is an artist and founder of Creative Reuse Marketplace in Springfield. Her sister is Lena Joy Rivas, founder of Ravens' Landing in California. They are both helping to bring Octopolis to Burning Man in the Nevada desert [—] say that, by the way. Should have looked it up. All right, thank you both so much for being with us. Good luck, uh, with the project, and, and I appreciate your time.

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Adina Rivas: Thank you so much. See you soon, Lena.

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Lena Joy Rivas: See you in the dust.

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Brian Mackey: That is it for us today. Coming up on Monday's program, another uphill campaign for U.S. Senate, uh, or excuse me, the U.S. House of Representatives. Darin LaHood was reelected unopposed in the 16th district last time around. He has a challenger. Democrat Paul Noll[y] will talk with him. That's coming up Monday on the 21st show, which is a production of Illinois Public Media. I'm Brian Mackey.