Before Miami’s staggering skyline, the land was shaped by the Everglades—a vast, wild wetland that served as a sanctuary for Indigenous peoples and Maroon communities who sought freedom in its tangled swamps. Yet, over time, portions of this natural landscape have been drained, rerouted, and transformed into the foundation of Miami’s sprawling urban growth. The land that once nurtured life now bears the scars of urbanization. With each canal dug, with each inch of earth transformed, the city feeds off of the land’s vitality like a parasite. In the face of this transformation, two artists—Luna Palazzolo-Daboul and Lee Pivnik—have turned to Miami’s past and future to craft a different narrative. Palazzolo-Daboul, with her underground space Tunnel Projects, creates a refuge for artists amidst the gentrification of Little Havana, preserving a space where the neighborhood’s spirit can still thrive. Pivnik, through his visionary Symbiotic House and The Living Room, reimagines a future where architecture and ecology coexist in adaptive harmony. Together, their work offers a counterpoint to Miami’s rapid urbanization, grounding the city’s struggle with gentrification and climate crisis in a deeper, more resilient connection to its past for a more fluid, interconnected future.

Tunnel Projects

For decades, Mediterranean duplexes of buoyant colors and horseshoe arches on Moorish apartment complexes have lined the streets of Little Havana. Flocks of roosters cross these streets in a frenzy, slipping past unforgiving cars blaring reggaeton and bachata, as local street vendors announce their wares and services in Spanish, be it nuts or knife sharpening. But, lately, these vestiges of historic Little Havana have been disappearing, replaced by prefabricated sterile white cubes masquerading as condominiums.

For Luna Palazzolo-Daboul, artist and owner of Tunnel Projects, the change has been obvious. In the past two years renting space in the heart of the neighborhood, Palazzolo-Daboul would chat with her elder neighbor, a tenant of one of Little Havana’s traditional homes and a fixture in the community. She had made it her unofficial job to keep the peace amongst the roosters and prevent them from fighting. She’d grab them, maintaining order in an otherwise lawless land for street roosters. But, one day, Palazzolo-Daboul noticed their cacophony had returned–the roosters were fighting again. In the next few days, the demolition trucks rolled in, the house was toppled, and her neighbor was gone.

“Who's going to keep the rooster from fighting?” said Palazzolo-Daboul. “It's the whole ecosystem that breaks when that happens. She had a role in this ecosystem, in this neighborhood, and now that's gone.”

Little Havana is just one of Miami’s many ecosystems at the intersection of gentrification and climate crisis. Despite rising sea levels and chronic flooding, new developments and housing costs continue to soar, pushing out the artists and communities who defined the city’s culture. Gentrification is not new to Miami: the city’s “urban core” neighborhoods have fought concurrent battles against rapid urban development and displacement since the late 20th century. Some, like Wynwood, have completely wiped out their historic Puerto Rican and immigrant residential and warehouse enclaves in favor of luxury high-rise apartments and designer stores. Other neighborhoods, like Little Haiti and Little Havana, have managed to stave off the entirety of cultural erasure and find themselves knee-deep in the fight. Artists like Palazzolo-Daboul are carving out a space for themselves in the ever-changing, endangered landscape.

Tunnel Projects, founded in 2022 by Palazzolo-Daboul and artist Anna Goraczko, is an artist-run gallery, studio, and project space in a Little Havana shopping center. Palazzolo-Daboul opened the space after her own studio lease expired and she needed a place to work. When Palazzolo-Daboul finally visited the building that houses Tunnel, she was drawn to its unique location: an underground parking garage that, by some Miami miracle, never floods. Around the corner from the shopping center’s main entrance, a graffiti-lined parking entrance greets guests. This is the pathway to Tunnel.

“It just happened,” Palazzolo-Daboul explains, reflecting on how, after years of working in the art world, the opportunity to create a space where both established and emerging artists could thrive presented itself almost naturally.

Here, Palazzolo-Daboul houses about ten artist studios, starting at $197 a month, including internet. The price is unheard of in a market where the median rent for a studio is $2,399 a month. Unsurprisingly, there is a waitlist (applicants were chosen based on need, career position, their engagement with Tunnel’s existing programming, and Tunnel’s ability to accommodate their practice). Tunnel also features two project spaces for exhibition. The underground space is adjacent to a row of studios, a rectangular space that is consistently reimagined for each artist’s show. Upstairs, in a passageway to the building’s sparsely used office space, is Touché Boutique—a window display that artists activate on a similar schedule as Tunnel Project’s exhibition room. Opening weekends are frequently packed and a staple in the community. Palazzolo-Daboul and Tunnel’s artists ensure the space is always active—hosting back-to-back shows, performances, and workshops.

“There are not many other places in Miami like this,” said Palazzolo-Daboul. “But I like to think that the artists that show here are also an amazing representation of what Miami has to offer.”

In the two years since Tunnel opened, newly vacant storefronts tell a similar tale of displacement that the surrounding neighborhood is facing. Parallel to the urban transformation, there is existential concern about the future of art spaces like Tunnel. Palazzolo-Daboul acknowledges the uncertainty of their location, given the rapid pace of development.

“I think about it. It’s impossible not to,” they confess, grappling with the precariousness of running an art space in an environment where real estate prices are constantly rising and properties are being sold off for redevelopment.

Tunnel follows a legacy of the city's artist-run spaces such as Bakehouse Center and Oolite Arts (originally Art Center/South Florida), cultivating a space for artists, by artists. But, Palazzolo-Daboul is not married to the idea of Tunnel becoming the next Bakehouse or Oolite.

“I can't sustain it forever,” they admit, contemplating a “funeral” for the space should it come to an end. “I know that Tunnel's gonna die, and I'd rather it goes down in history as a little gem that existed rather than decay.”

Since opening, Tunnel has expanded to present a pop-up annex in the Design District, keeping the local cultural conversation alive in a neighborhood that has already succumbed to multiple waves of gentrification. During Art Week, Tunnel presented a photography exhibit by Esdras Thelusma, curated by Reginald O’Neal—two artists who were raised in Miami, and whose works are a direct reflection of the city's urban landscapes and habitats. Thelusma, a photographer known for his compelling work in the world of hip-hop album covers, tells a story of pain, resilience, and the complex relationship between subject and photographer.

Thelusma’s exhibition In Plain Sight is a testament to this deep connection between subject, moment, and visual narrative. Thelusma’s portraits feature iconic figures from the music industry, rising stars, and everyday people, like a young hip-hop artist caught in a cycle of violence and incarceration. In one especially poignant set, the artist's last moments before heading to prison are captured. These photographs, taken as part of an album shoot, are laden with emotional weight. The subject is not smiling, nor is there any attempt at the performative flair often associated with public-facing figures; what is presented is raw, unfiltered, and intensely personal.

As Palazzolo-Daboul explains, the photos are “deeply involved with the subject” and "the camera"—an interaction so intimate that it often feels as though there is no barrier between the viewer and the subject’s eyes. The show’s installation is minimalist, Pallazolo-Daboul says. The focus remains solely on the photographs. There are no painted walls, no distractions.

As we look up at the underground window, onto the busy Little Havana street, we are decidedly below sea level. But Palazzolo-Daboul reassures me, it never floods.

Lee Pivnik

In the early days of the pandemic, Lee Pivnik would run along Biscayne Bay at Morningside Park, an idyllic, sprawling field in Miami’s “urban core.” One day, Pivnik opened his car door and smelled death. Scores of fish, washed up, floated on their backs.

“Some of the fish I'd never seen in the bay,” said Pivnik. “It was like a whole biodiversity survey, but of death.”

When people talk about mass extinction, it's usually an almost invisible disappearance. But, for Pivnik, the loss was right in front of him.

“It's the most horrific thing I've ever seen,” said Pivnik. “This felt like a concrete moment where you could see an ecosystem collapse, and it was collapsing from the effects of oxygen depletion and algae blooms.”

While Tunnel Projects addresses the urban and social fabric of Miami through the preservation and adaptation of physical spaces, Lee Pivnik’s Symbiotic House and various artistic projects tackle the question of ecological resilience. Since 2022, Pivnik has been developing Symbiotic House, envisioning a multi-use space designed for both human and non-human species and addressing the intertwined crises of climate change and affordable housing in South Florida.

Pivnik’s project blends architecture, ecology, and community engagement to propose an adaptive solution for living in an increasingly unstable environment. The idea is to create a habitat that allows for the survival and flourishing of both the human population and the natural world, focusing on marginalized communities who are most vulnerable to both environmental and socio-economic disruptions.

Growing up in South Miami from a long line of Floridians, Pivnik was always immersed in the Everglades. For the uninitiated, the Everglades is thought of as a nuisance worth dredging—if the gators and Burmese pythons don’t get you, the mosquitos certainly will. But, for those like Pivnik, the Everglades represent the convergence of nine unique habitats, housing ghost orchids and panthers while simultaneously supplying the drinking water for 8 million Floridians. When Pivnik returned to Miami after studying in the Northeast, he determined there was no better place to conduct his art-driven research.

The genesis of Symbiotic House stems from Pivnik’s academic and professional immersion in queer ecology. Pivnik has worked for over seven years on the Institute of Queer Ecology, a project dedicated to exploring how queer identity intersects with environmental issues. Queer ecology, as Pivnik describes it, offers a framework for understanding nature as a network of interdependent, non-hierarchical relationships. This philosophy rejects the traditional, anthropocentric view of humans as separate from nature, instead promoting an understanding of humanity as an integral part of a multi-species world. Through his work, Pivnik aims to make visible these ecological and queer entanglements, asking the viewer to reconsider what it means to live symbiotically—not just with each other, but with the world around us.

Through workshops, field trips, and lectures, Symbiotic House encouraged South Floridians to participate in the design process, drawing on local knowledge and expertise. This participatory model empowers residents to create adaptive solutions for their own homes and neighborhoods. For now, Symbiotic House is paused; Pivnik is searching for more funding, and is focusing on, among other things, a new project that uses a small-scale, indoor aquaponics system to create both an art installation, and a participatory laboratory. This project, based out of his apartment and called The Living Room, involves an aquaponics system, made of handbuilt ceramics and bamboo-like tubing, where plants and fish work symbiotically to filter water and absorb heavy metals like mercury and phosphorus that pollute the waters of the Everglades. This initiative is particularly urgent in Florida, where Indigenous communities face significant health risks due to the contamination of local fish populations.

The project’s significance lies in its invitation for audiences to reconsider their relationship to water and food production. By creating an aquaponics system in his home, Pivnik proposes a model for how urban environments can contribute to environmental repair while simultaneously growing food for the residents who maintain it. The project also operates as a critique of the current agricultural systems, particularly in Florida, which are deeply tied to industrial practices like sugarcane farming that degrade the environment. Here, Pivnik envisions a future where local communities can work together to restore the hydrology of the Everglades through cooperative farming practices, possibly integrated with renewable energy systems like solar panels, thus creating a sustainable, restorative agricultural model.

While The Living Room embraces the tangible, everyday aspects of environmental repair, it is also part of a larger body of work that envisions speculative futures through the lens of environmental and social collapse. In his recent exhibition Chimeras, Pivnik imagines a future in which the effects of climate change and political instability have led to the collapse of Miami as we know it. In this sculptural work, which was on view during Art Week at Oolite Arts, Pivnik draws on a variety of cultural references, from speculative fiction to queer fables, to construct a world where joy, beauty, and collective resistance emerge in the face of catastrophe. As Pivnik explains, Chimeras is a "cli-fi" (climate fiction) story, one that imagines a Miami decimated by a Category 5 hurricane. The world of Chimeras is not apocalyptic, however. Instead, it offers a narrative of resilience, where mutated beings and new forms of alliance emerge in the wake of environmental collapse.

The influence of writers such as Karen Russell, author of The Gondoliers, and the queer commune of Lavender Hill in Ithaca can be seen in the exhibition’s framing. Russell's story, which imagines a group of people born into a sunken Miami, offers a vision of adaptation to ecological change. In a similar vein, Chimeras explores the idea of collective survival amidst catastrophe, imagining alliances between queer communities and feminists as they build resistance against a militarized empire. This nod to queer futurism and eco-activism resonates deeply within the context of Florida, a state where environmental degradation, political instability, and the marginalization of Indigenous and LGBTQ+ communities intersect.

“The family stories I have are only of Miami,” he shares, underscoring the intergenerational ties that anchor his understanding of place.

Miami is a city of contrasts—its lush biodiversity is marred by environmental destruction, its cultural richness interwoven with a history of immigration, and its rapid gentrification creating a precarious future for both the land and its people. These dualities are reflected in Pivnik’s artistic practice, which embraces the fluidity of queer identity as a model for survival in a world marked by flux.

“Queerness teaches us to be mutable and to be flexible, to embrace change,” he asserts. In a city like Miami, where the effects of climate change are already visible and where rising sea levels threaten to permanently alter the landscape, this concept of mutability becomes particularly urgent.

One of Pivnik’s central ideas is that the built environment—from architecture to city planning—is often designed with an assumption of permanence, whereas the natural world is inherently in a state of flux. The structures that humans build are “rigid,” he notes, and in a world where change is constant, this rigidity is both a philosophical and ecological limitation. Thus, Symbiotic House and The Living Room become a meditation on how we might build and live in a world that is responsive to change, embracing a new ethic of fluidity, adaptability, and interdependence.

Pivnik describes Miami’s relationship with its surrounding environment as parasitic. Miami, a city built on a floodplain, owes its existence to extensive environmental engineering, including canals and hydrological projects that have reshaped the Everglades. These interventions have allowed for human habitation, but have come at a steep cost to the natural world. The environmental damage caused by these projects is a key theme in Pivnik’s work, as he seeks to highlight the fragility of a city built at odds with its ecosystem. In this sense, Miami’s urbanization is a form of parasitism, where human life flourishes only through the exploitation and manipulation of the land.

Yet, Miami’s economic survival is deeply tied to the real estate market, and much of its infrastructure is dependent on the assumption that the city will remain habitable despite the impending threats of sea-level rise. Pivnik’s reflections on Miami’s vulnerability paint a grim picture of Florida’s financial future as the housing market collapses under the pressures of climate change and insurance uncertainty. In Pivnik’s eyes, the city’s survival is predicated on a myth of permanence that fails to account for the mutable, interconnected nature of the world.

But Pivnik still wants to stay in Miami, regardless of the environmental and political challenges.

“I want to live here for a while, maybe my whole life,” he says, recognizing that the city’s struggles present an opportunity for cultural transformation. “As much as my practice is concerned with the future, the present is incredible. We’ve created Miami to all its faults. So, even if it's all underwater one day, if this place can be better for all of the beings that call it home today, including myself and my friends, it's a joyful thing to savor while we have it.”