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October 8th, 2025 - January 10th, 2026
Picnic Curatorial Projects at The Power Station
Employing documentary and narrative filmmaking strategies, this experimental docu-fantasy explores the symbolic and unconscious underpinnings of the Ike Dike. The Ike Dike, named after Hurricane Ike, is the nickname for a $57 billion water development infrastructure project called the Texas Coastal Barrier Project. Expanding upon the existing Galveston Seawall, the Ike Dike is framed as a means of protection from hurricane-induced storm surge flooding in Galveston Bay and along the petrochemical corridor in the Houston Ship Channel. When completed, it will include a greater than two-mile-long ocean barrier that, when closed, will plug the entrance to Galveston Bay.
Critics of the project argue that it will not even protect against the largest storms, that it offers private corporations protections that they should have been required to create for themselves, and that it could be highly detrimental to local ecosystems.
Juxtaposing real-world interviews with corps officers, footage of bureaucratic procedures, and historical narratives of local environmental infrastructure projects with staged civic action and musical performances, IT IS A GOOD PROJECT AND SHOULD BE BUILT untangles the irony at the heart of the Ike Dike project: the industries it is designed to protect are the very industries driving the escalation of superstorms in Texas and around the globe.
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Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist and filmmaker. His projects attempt to bring awareness to unconscious processes on the individual and group level. He has presented films, installations, and performances internationally at venues including SculptureCenter and Abrons Arts Center, (New York), Links Hall (Chicago), The Darling Foundry (Montreal), LightBox and The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Artspace (New Haven), The Museum of Fine Arts and FotoFest (Houston), Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien (Graz), and Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna). His recent film Committee of Six is an official selection of the 2022-23 Architecture and Design Film Festival and was awarded a jury prize for best film at the 2023 Onion City Experimental Film Festival.
