For Yale ISM's Sacred Cosmologies, Environmental Change, and Expressive Culture initiative, Patte Loper is collaborating with Earth scientist Andrew Kemp and multidisciplinary artist, educator and community organizer, Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) to connect climate science and social justice through speculative world building practices. The project involves the creation of an exhibition and symposium.

This work intentionally muddles boundaries between the ceremonial/sacred and the scientific use-value of the saltmarsh and surrounding oceans in order to evoke pluriversal contact zones, described as "cosmopolitical events" or sites where, through differing worldviews and ways of life—often capitalist-modernist and Indigenous/relational/more-than-human encounter each other. These zones are marked by tension and conflict, as they challenge the imposition of a single, universal world by insisting on the coexistence of multiple, valid realities.

Paintings in this exhibition focus on plankton found in local salt marshes and oceans, particularly microscopic species, that are often overlooked but who are part of a biological system that provides the oxygen and nutrients that make life on Earth possible and whose bodies and life cycles contribute materially to mitigating the worse effects of climate change.

Our desire is to use this speculation to highlight accountability, to help us consider what is owed locally and globally, by institutions that rest in and profit from lands that were once interconnected ecosystems.