Warming | Warning

 
Toni Morrison was right.

“You know,” she wrote in The Site of Memory, “they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

Water remembers.

Water is all we have and all we are; we are made of it and live on a planet covered in it. Yet we of water seem not to remember that. We dry out our home and so ourselves. The last two centuries have been a disaster for our little house among the stars. We’ve beaten our ploughshares into iPads, our bell towers into smokestacks, and stared in self-congratulation as the planet boils off. 

We will so soon be dead for so long, yet we will—like the Mississippi—forever leave the fingerprints of where we used to be.

WARMING | WARNING is a visual conversation—sets of triptychs featuring aerial, ground-based, and textual responses on the future of man-made climate change in the United States and the landscape of inequality for future generations that climate change stands to create.

Exploring, primarily, bodies of water that due to global warming have now become sere land, and the many signs of warning—metaphorical and literal—along the way, this work focuses on our nonchalance in response to the greatest human crisis of this or any lifetime. Within the next 30 years alone, climate change is expected to cause the mass migration of roughly 143 million people as the planet’s equatorial zone becomes unlivable, leading to famine, child death, social unrest, and war as it strains economies, educational and healthcare systems, and general infrastructure.

While working on my second book—about the lives of Holocaust survivors making their journey to postwar American futures—one particular subject sticks with me: a man named Irving Roth, who’d walked out of a concentration camp 75 years earlier and, on the morning of our interview, busted out of the hospital to meet me. Two months before his death, and with plastic medical bracelets still over his cellophane-papered wrist, he told me something important: “Nobody realizes this, but there are signs all along the road to Auschwitz. You need to know and recognize them.”

Disasters are rarely surprising. There are often roads to them, rising and falling, curved and gnarled, but well-advertised all along the path. Today, too, we are on a road. Today, too, there are signs all along the way. Water remembers. We should too.

Warming | Warning premieres in an exhibition curated by Craig Deppen Auge at the Kansas City Public Library on October 18, 2025, to be followed with exhibitions in Britain and Italy.

About the Artist

B.A. Van Sise is an author and photographic artist with three monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust with Mayim Bialik, and On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues with DeLanna Studi.  He is a two-time winner of the Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medal, a two-time Prix de la Photographie Paris winner, an Anthem Award winner, a finalist for the INDIES Book of the Year and the Rattle and Kenyon Review Poetry Prizes, and a winner of the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction.

Find more of B.A. Van Sise’s work at bavansise.format.com.