On Wednesday, Chevron admitted that it took down the public art piece in a statement made to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The installation on company property was removed, in keeping with our security, safety and facilities policies,” a Chevron representative wrote to ARTnews. “Our fences and other company facilities are functional equipment and we cannot allow tampering or unauthorized construction.”

The artists and organizers behind the project, meanwhile, argue that Fencelines was mostly on a city-owned portion of the fence, which runs alongside a running trail and is separated from Chevron property by a six-lane thoroughfare. Fencelines, which was brought to life by community organizer Princess Robinson and artist Graham LP, had been in the making over the past year and a half, during which they and Gita Khandagle, an artist and designer, reached out to Chevron and city officials to ascertain who owned the fence so they could get approval for the project.

According to the organizers, Chevron never responded but the city did, approving the project. Graham LP and other people involved claim that the majority of the project was installed on the city-owned portion of the fence but bled into a part of the fence that Chevron owns.

“But we don’t want this to just become about the fence and who owns it. This conversation is about who owns the air, who has permission or the right to [impact it],” LP told ARTnews. “Though we’ll definitely push the property aspect of this when it comes down to it, they massively overreached.”

Fencelines was designed to call attention to the environmental and health impact that the refinery has on the Richmond community, where asthma rates are double the state average, according to an ongoing study at University of California, San Francisco. Slats painted with wishes for clean air and water from the community were attached to the fence and topped with ribbons that were activated by the wind, showing that the residents of Richmond live perpetually downwind from the refinery. The piece was installed April 22, on Earth Day.

As of publication, the company has not confirmed whether the piece has been destroyed or is in storage somewhere. Up until Wednesday evening, the artists and organizers associated with Fencelines thought the piece had been stolen as Chevron never reached out to them following the deinstallation or warned them of their impending action. But there were suspicions.

“As soon as it happened I was like, ‘That was Chevron, they’re trying to erase us,'” Katt Ramos, the managing director of Richmond Our Power Coalition, told ARTnews. The coalition brings together local organizations fighting for housing and a just transition away from the oil based industries that surround the area.

“[I thought] that was Chevron because we were three or four days away from Anti-Chevron Day and four or five days away from their stakeholder meeting, they don’t want any bad press.”

The Coalition and Anti-Chevron Day began as a response to the 2012 Chevron Richmond Refinery Fire, the resulting chemical release incident, and the general health issues that residents of Richmond tie to their proximity to the refinery, which has been operating in the city for 120 years. Ramos pointed out that earlier this year unionized steelworkers at the Chevron refinery struck for safer working conditions, which led, the union alleged, to at least five workers being let go.

“But there’s some signs on the fence and now they’re worried about safety?” said Ramos.

Robinson, LP, and Khandagle partnered with numerous organizations and with the Richmond Arts Center to make the installation as well as an accompanying exhibition at RAC that was made possible with a grant from the California Arts Council.

“We invited people to come and make some of these wooden slats, to paint messages of hope, messages of vision for a future where we have clean air, a healthy environment,” Roberto Martinez, a curator at RAC, told ARTnews. “We wanted to bring in people for dialogue about the lived experience of of the Richmond community, which has a very rich and complex history with environmental justice.”

Though there were a few references to Chevron in the signs, for the most part Martinez recalled that messages were generally calls for clean air and water, for love, and for resilience, and that the project was not particularly confrontational. Over 200 wooden slats were painted for the project, which was slated to be de-installed on June 3.

Princess Robinson, who works with Urban Tilth, never saw the project as antagonistic. “I’m a cooperative education and facilitator, I really believe in the cooperative model, to work amongst each other and for everyone to be at the table,” Robinson told ARTnews. Since finding out Chevron took down the piece, Robinson has been trying to see the positive side to this unfortunate situation, but it hasn’t been easy.

“Being a human, at first I was mad, I felt discouraged. I felt disrespected. I felt like well, dang, I don’t matter, all that work that I did doesn’t matter, bringing my community out doesn’t matter,” said Robinson. “But my intentions are now a reality, right, I wanted to have a conversation.”

Now Chevron is reaching out to the organizers as they try to backtrack from what has become a much larger story than could have been anticipated. The next steps are to find out if the work was destroyed and how to respond to the events with another art piece.

Luckily, for Chevron, Robinson is magnanimous.

“Me personally, there’s no bad blood,” said Robinson. “I want Chevron to know, let’s cooperate together and be more compassionate, more respectful, because there’s a better way that we could have done this.”

The activists, both members of the Letze Generazione climate activist organization, glued themselves to the frame of The Bethlehemitische Kindermord (1638) by Peter Paul Rubens. The painting, which depicts children being stolen from the mothers was chosen for the action to represent a future being stolen due to climate change.

The adhesive left behind on the frame warranted attention by conservators. An initial estimate for the monetary damages was 11,000 Euros, but that price has now ballooned to 50,000, according to a report by Monopol. During court proceedings today, the general director of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Bernhard Maaz, said that the trace amounts of adhesive left would only be visible to the trained eye.

The defendants’ lawyer attempted to argue that these trace amounts of damage might in fact increase the value of the frame one day, marked as it is now with potentially historical significance and further argued that the charges should be dropped all together. The judge did not agree and the trial will continue later this month to determine if a fine should be levied against the protestors and if so, what amount.

For their part, the protestors stand behind their actions, one of them saying, “I would agree to stick myself to the frame regularly if necessary.” Meanwhile, the younger protestor clarified his organizations actions in museums, “We don’t want to destroy art, we don’t want to be terrorists.”

“After achieving the certification of Carbon neutrality for the 78^th Venice International Film Festival in 2021, this year La Biennale di Venezia worked systematically to fight climate change by promoting a more sustainable model for the design, installation and operation of its festivals,” the statement reads.

Though the Venice Biennale is perhaps best known for its art exhibition, which this year held its 59th iteration this year, the Biennale also puts on events dedicated to theatre, dance, music, and film in 2022. It also holds an architecture biennial, but its next edition isn’t until next year.

The Biennale was given their certification by RINA, a Genoa-based company that has been accredited by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Biennale said it achieved its certification by using energy from renewable sources; reducing, reusing, and recycling materials used, such as exhibition materials and equipment; and by offering more vegetarian options made with locally sourced produce.

To further reach their carbon neutrality goals, the Biennale also purchased carbon offset credits that support renewable energy projects in India and Colombia.

One of the most carbon-producing activities generated by the fairs is something that will be hard to address: travel. In a major success for the art Biennale, there was a 35 percent increase in attendance this year as compared to 2019, with 800,000 tickets sold, not including the 22,498 people who visited during the preview days of the exhibition. More than half of the visitors—59 percent to be exact—were foreign to Italy, meaning that many likely flew internationally to visit the Biennale.

The Biennale nodded to this massive carbon expenditure, while also suggesting that it could only do so much to make travel ecologically efficient.

“For all the events, the most important component of the overall carbon footprint concerns the mobility of the participating public,” the Biennale’s statement read. “In this sense, La Biennale will engage again next year in a communication campaign to raise the awareness of the public.”

Rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten to flood Egypt’s archaeological sites, including the ancient temple complex in Luxor and most of Alexandria, Egypt’s largest city, which was built below sea level in 331 B.C.E. by Alexander the Great. Hussein Abdel Basir, director of the Antiquities Museum at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, told the Mirror Tuesday that the ancient city could be underwater within 30 years. Among its many treasures is the 15th-century Citadel of Qaitbay in Alexandria.

Air pollution and extreme weather events also pose threats to the country’s archaeological treasures, according to Bassir. “One third of every natural site, and one sixth of every cultural heritage site is currently under threat due to climate change,” he said.

Egypt, with its arid landscape and low-lying cities scattered along the Mediterranean and Nile River, will see severe consequences of climate change if sustainability is not prioritized worldwide. Experts have projected an increase in heat waves, dust storms, and rainstorms, all of which corrode stone and wash color from ancient statuary. 

In November, the New York Times reported that the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor will be “gone completely” within the century without urgent intervention; some temples stone are already showing wear from moisture.  

Egypt is also warming at the fastest rate of any country in the world, as most experts project an average temperature increase of over three degrees Fahrenheit with each successive decade. In the southern city of Aswan, temperatures regularly surpass 100 degrees Fahrenheit to the suffering of ancient granite monuments. The drastic shifts between Aswan’s sweltering days and cool nights have caused cracks in the granite, damaging inscriptions and imagery. 

Egypt’s industrial boom, beginning in the late 1800s, has accelerated the deterioration of Egypt’s cultural heritage. Growing cities need more agriculture—which means more water—straining the fragile ecosystem around the Nile. Agricultural irrigation for villages near the pyramids has caused groundwater to rise and, unable to be absorbed by loose soil, runoff has pooled around the paws of the Sphinx. 

The Egyptian government has made moves to mitigate environmental catastrophe, this year launching the National Climate Change Strategy which finances sustainable projects. $13 million has been earmarked to preserve the Citadel of Qaitbay from rising sea levels. 

Benedicte de Montlaur, World Monuments Fund President, said in a statement that it is important to “underscore not only the vulnerability of historic sites to climate change but also how heritage conservation can point us to ways of mitigating the worst effects of a warming world.”

Whether it is coastal erosion ravaging archaeological sites in Iran, Scotland, and Florida due to increased violent storms and the rise of the ocean, or increased microbial degradation due to the loss of Arctic permafrost, climate change is currently impacting archeological sites “on such a wide global scale, and within so many different contexts, that it is too great a problem for any single organization or discipline to tackle alone,” the article reads.

The article, “Climate change and the loss of archaeological sites and landscapes: a global perspective,” by Jørgen Hollesen, analyzes numerous recent papers by fellow archaeologists to assess the global impact of climate change on heritage sites in the present and future, while also assessing potential solutions.

Reviewing the work of his peers, Hollesen found that the effect of climate change is such that it is undermining one of the key tenets of archaeology: to preserve cultural heritage.

“[This tenet implies] that the archaeological record can be protected with no, or only minor, degradation or loss,” Hollesen wrote. “In the face of accelerated climate change, the wider principle of conserving and preserving as much as possible seems increasingly unsustainable.”

Hollesen compiled a list of developing strategies for protecting archaeological sites that archaeologists have begun to propose but, due to a lack of political action and technical ability, will be difficult to deploy. For example, climate prediction models need to become more accurate so as to better pinpoint which regions and, thus, which archaeological sites will face which kind and which degree of damage. But that information is only the first step.

“Even if archaeologists and planners in years to come are equipped with tools efficient enough to pin-point the most vulnerable sites, they will still be faced with difficult decisions: which sites should be saved, and which sites should be allowed to decay?” he wrote.

One strategy that Hollesen writes of is the underplayed potential of archaeology to prompt political and popular will to address climate change, which is only real solution to the loss of humanity’s cultural heritage.

“Iconic places of ‘outstanding value’, such as World Heritage and other well-known sites, can be used to stress to a global audience the urgency of climate action,” Hollesen wrote, referencing the “National Landmarks at Risk” study that the Union of Concerned Scientists published in 2014.

The painting, which hangs in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, Netherlands, is the latest to be targeted by climate activists. Earlier this month, activists threw tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the UK’s National Gallery, and, a few days later, activists threw mashed potatoes at Claude Monet’s Meules at a museum in Germany.

Climate change protests that involve gluing or throwing liquids at paintings began in late June, with most actions committed by the UK climate activism group Just Stop Oil, with other activist organizations in Germany and Italy joining in.

The activists who took part in the action at the Hague Thursday wore Just Stop Oil t-shirts, but aren’t confirmed Just Stop Oil protestors.

“How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless apparently being destroyed before your eyes?” asked one of the protesters in The Hague, according to reporting by the Guardian. “Do you feel outraged? Good. Where is that feeling when you see the planet being destroyed?”

There is no information yet as to whether or not the painting has been damaged. However, none of the works targeted in these protests have been damaged so far; destruction has not been activists’ stated intentions.

In an interview with ARTnews, Simon Bramwell, co-founder of global environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion, who has joined Just Stop Oil protestors, explained why young activists chose this form of protest.

“This is not about negating the beauty of art but a way of saying that our priorities are absolutely fucked right now. There are people wandering around these art galleries finding beauty inherent in art that depicts nature, and yet are unable to comprehend the beauty that is disappearing with our ancient forests, or the hundreds of species that are going extinct each day.”