A ROAD NOT TAKEN (2010) HD video, 66 min. “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people – harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.” On 20 June 1979, US President Jimmy Carter inaugurated the installation of solar panels on the roof of the West Wing of the White House with these words and announced federal initiatives intended to secure that 20 percent of American energy would come from renewable sources by the year 2000. The showcase energy programme was largely overshadowed by the Iranian hostage crisis just a few months after Carter’s speech, and his successor, free-market champion Ronald Reagan, had the panels dismantled while the roof was being repaired seven years later. A Road Not Taken is a documentary film essay which follows Hemauer | Keller as they locate the panels on an environmentally-minded college’s cafeteria roof in Maine – where they had been functioning from 1992 until 2005 – and their subsequent road trip with two of the panels strapped to the roof of a vegetable-oil-powered pick-up truck. Carter’s warning was partially correct in that two of the panels are now museum pieces: the artists presented one to the Jimmy Carter Library & Museum in Atlanta and the other to the National Museum of American History, Washington. Yet how can Carter’s long-sightedness, and the failure of his ambitions, be understood over thirty years later? The artists trace the contemporary resonances, the political and historical echoes, of this largely forgotten episode in American policy through interviews with those involved – including with President Carter himself. Text: Latitudes Photo: Latitudes

Another green installation: this solar hot water heater was installed on the back, south-facing roof of our workshop.