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MIT Brings FEMA Trailer Project to Campus

Cambridge, MA...How can a controversial travel trailer the size of a small classroom, benefit community and perhaps change the world? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will come one step closer to answering that question, when it unveils a FEMA trailer at MIT on April 30, 2008.

“We will not ever use trailers again,” FEMA Director David Paulison at a press conference in New Orleans with Center for Disease Control Director Julie Gerberding, on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008.

The FEMA trailer has a controversial history and evokes sensitive issues for many around environmental health and justice, public housing, and governmental responsibility and effectiveness.

In 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (“FEMA”) purchased approximately 145,000 trailers and mobile homes just before and after Hurricane Katrina, largely through no-bid contracts, at an average of $18,620 each at a total cost of $2.7 billion. Between 90,000 and 120,000 units were occupied by storm victims, leaving a surplus of approximately 8,420 brand new, fully furnished, never-used mobile homes. As a result of this surplus and the return of used FEMA trailers, as of early 2007, FEMA had 60,000 trailers in storage nationwide, sitting in lots. Months after FEMA deployed the trailers, some residents began to complain of respiratory problems associated with formaldehyde off-gassing. Moreover, social ills plague trailer communities—mental health problems are significantly higher in FEMA communities than in other areas in the Gulf Coast.
FEMA Trailer Project

Working with undergraduate and graduate students at MIT, Visual Arts Program Visiting Lecturer Jae Rhim Lee (SMVisS ’06) will research and develop tools to understand the history and issues surrounding the FEMA Trailer and use this understanding to transform the trailer into a vehicle that can address disasters critically. While it awaits transformation, the FEMA trailer will serve as the interim Center for Art, Media, and Politics (CAMP), a space for research, dialogue, and projects addressing contemporary issues such as disasters, environmental sustainability, and the like. The FEMA Trailer will be parked at 620 Putnam Avenue in Cambridge, MA for the duration of the project.

Working with Sally Susnowitz and the MIT Public Service Center, the FEMA Trailer Project will issue the MIT FEMA Trailer Challenge in Fall 2008, a competition with awards open to the MIT community which will ask students across departments to propose solutions to formaldehyde off-gassing, surplus trailers, and other problems with the FEMA Trailer.

On May 12, 2008 the FEMA Trailer Project will host an exhibit at 620 Putnam Avenue in conjunction with the course Online Participatory Media -- Networks, Tactics, Breakdown, taught by Amber Frid-Jimenez. The exhibit will feature interim research from the FEMA Trailer Project as well as student projects in the Networks Tactics, Breakdown class.

“I became interested in FEMA Trailers after working on recovery efforts in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina,” says Lee. “The FEMA Trailer symbolizes the tragedies, controversies, system failures as well as the incredible opportunity for renewal that disasters present.”

It is the intention of the FEMA Trailer Project to intersect with contemporary issues critically without being negative or critical of the institutions, organizations, or individuals involved. The goal of the FEMA Trailer Project is to find positive alternatives to contemporary issues through a collaborative, research-based artistic practice that engages governmental actors, community partners, artists, and scholars.”

Though problem solving and creativity is not new to MIT, the inspiration for this project comes from an unlikely place on MIT’s campus, the Visual Arts Program (VAP), which caters to ten Visual Arts graduate students and nearly 150 undergraduate students, within the aegis of the Department of Architecture at MIT.

“Artistic practice and research often can be overshadowed by the great scientific achievements made on MIT’s campus,” says Ute Meta Bauer, Director of the VAP. “The potential to put an idea into action, that benefits the community, must call upon both artistic and scientific modes of examination, understanding, interpretation and lastly implementation.”

This coupling of artistic and scientific methodology is also being implemented in the VAP Monday Lecture series “Zones of Emergency” (ZOE) which furthers ideas developed by the FEMA Trailer Project. ZOE examines the scale and complexity of catastrophe and disaster scenarios through lectures and panel discussions with artists, scholars, and practitioners like Alfredo Jaar, Mel Chin, and Mark Tribe.

For more information about the FEMA Trailer Project, the Zones of Emergency Lecture Series, or the MIT Visual Arts Program, please visit www.zonesofemergency.net

If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with members of the MIT Visual Arts Program, please call James Pollack at (617) 253-5229 or e-mail vap@mit.edu