NEW YORK, NY.- Every Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the members of the North Side Skull and Bone Gang emerge onto the streets of the Tremé neighborhood in a dawn ritual that dates back more than 200 years. Clad in black-and-white skeleton suits and ornamented papier-mâché masks, they wake the city to the sound of drums and bells summoning the ancestors.

Their ritual carries deep significance, even lessons for the whole planet, said artist and activist Imani Jacqueline Brown, who filmed the procession this year. “They’re breaching the divide between the world of the spirits and the world of the living,” she said. “They are singing to us that we’ve got to live today because tomorrow we might die.”

Brown, 36, grew up in New Orleans; she now lives in London, a member of the research and visual investigations group Forensic Architecture. An exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in Manhattan through Aug. 31 combines her research chops with the poetry and spirituality that she sees in the grassroots culture in her hometown.

The show, titled “Gulf,” is written with a strike-through and pronounced “Strike Gulf.” Its central focus is the impact of the oil and gas industry on south Louisiana. But the more sources Brown mines — including core samples of deep-sea drilling by geologists in the Gulf of Mexico and archives of oil boycott campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s, along with her own footage from New Orleans — the broader the scope of her project becomes. It reaches back into geological time while linking to the climate emergency today.

The resulting works bring some welcome lyricism to the field of “research art.” The exhibition includes a video installation in which the Skull and Bone Gang procession, bathed in bluish light, is overlaid on footage she made at the city’s aquarium, where sharks and rays float around a model of an offshore rig in a display about the Gulf of Mexico that is sponsored by oil corporations.

“I wanted to demystify oil and gas production,” Brown said in an interview after the show’s opening. “The voice you need to adopt in order to communicate this information needs to be clear, but without losing the sense of poetry.”

Storefront, a nonprofit gallery, is known for projects that imagine alternative ways to organize and share public space. Brown’s exhibition is part of a yearlong program titled “Swamplands,” that explores the “material politics of water” around the Gulf of Mexico, said Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa, the organization’s deputy director and curator.

Facing climate change, planners often default to “solutionism, or engineering ourselves out of catastrophe,” Ruiz said, adding, “we’re hoping to open up different ways to engage.”

To face down disaster is something of a New Orleans specialty. The city was once the largest slave market in North America, and its culture has been shaped by the long effects of colonization and enslavement. Oil extraction has transformed the region’s land and waterways; petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River form what is known as “cancer alley.” Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 and the ravages of the pandemic continue the litany of challenges.

Brown was a teenager when Katrina’s floodwaters overwhelmed the family’s house in the Mid-City area. She finished high school on the East Coast then attended Columbia University, studying anthropology with an art minor. After college she took part in Occupy Wall Street, and in 2012, in Occupy Sandy, the activist-led relief effort following Hurricane Sandy.

The echoes of Katrina rang like a summons home. “Watching disaster capitalism swoop in, in the aftermath of the storm,” she said, using Naomi Klein’s term for the phenomenon in which corporations and speculators take advantage of calamities, “I realized that I needed to go back to New Orleans.”

She invested herself in projects that blended art and organizing. She helped found Blights Out, a project that sought to purchase a blighted property fairly from its owners, not the predatory auction system that took hold after Katrina, and put it to community use. In 2018, working at the arts group Antenna, she organized a “Fossil Free Festival” to challenge the industry’s local power.

Since moving to London, Brown said, she has expanded her analytic range, first as a graduate student and then with Forensic Architecture, known for investigating state and corporate violence worldwide. “I was bumping up against the complexity and layered nature of our ecological crisis,” she said.

At Forensic Architecture, she has steered a collaboration with RISE St. James, a grassroots advocacy group. It uses remote-sensing data and historical maps to hone in on evidence, such as stands of trees, that may suggest burial grounds of enslaved people on the plantation lands that are now occupied by petrochemical plants.

Brown’s work in her Storefront exhibition likewise draws on archival research, data processing algorithms and mapping software. But “Gulf” is also an artistic project that bridges various disciplines.

One theme is infrastructure. Covering one wall of the gallery is a hand-painted diagram that maps south Louisiana’s oil and gas wells, dredging canals and pipelines. The source is a state database that Brown said has not been publicly accessible since she last used it in 2021. She used the same data to generate an online platform titled “Follow the Oil.”

Another theme is multinational corporate power. A wall-scale collage features pamphlets and news articles pertaining to oil extraction in Louisiana and Angola from 1950 to 1975, when Angola gained independence from Portugal, after a long war of liberation. Gulf Oil, now defunct, was active in both places and the target of an international boycott campaign. The collage forms two nested spirals that evoke a hurricane.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, printed on light boxes, are photographs of thin earth sections extracted in a 1968 drilling expedition in the Gulf. Brown also produced a video animation that takes us deep into the Earth’s core using drilling data from 2005; as it plays, we hear a soundtrack that technology artist Mark Mushiva designed using an algorithm that converts the geological patterns to musical notes.

More than just bridge disciplines, Brown aims to connect them with ancestral knowledge and cosmologies. Indigenous people, she noted, called the region Bulbancha, “the land of many languages” for its fertility and biodiversity — “an ecological multicultural crossroads,” as she puts it in a broadsheet that accompanies the exhibition.

In our interview, she pointed out that the Kongo people, who helped shape New Orleans as one of the groups enslaved in the Middle Passage, depict the cycles of human existence through a circular cosmogram that inspired her collages and video animations. Its horizontal axis, known as the Kalunga line, indicates the boundary between the spirits and the living. That conception, she noted, persists to this day in rituals like the Skull and Bone Gang procession.

“The idea is that one is constantly moving across and between the above and below,” Brown said. “What knowledge we acquire in life, and how we ensure that we are not repeating the same mistakes generation after generation, is an overarching theme of the exhibition.”

Eyal Weizman, the founder and director of Forensic Architecture, said that Brown skillfully navigates between technical and poetic registers. “She can be an expert witness in court, and at the same time she can take these data points and build something sensuous and appealing,” he said. “She understands the value of the world as it is in order to be transformed into something else.”

Driving Brown’s art and research alike is her conviction that the world’s ecological crises aren’t intractable. “We humans are able to look back across these great leaps of time and recognize the catastrophe that we are producing, and that we can also organize against,” she said. “And maybe we should choose to do that.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.