800-Pound Gorilla

Project Team:
Rania Ghosn + El Hadi Jazairy
Lesley Lokko (Narrator)

In “800-Pound Gorilla,” DESIGN EARTH casts Bushman the Gorilla from Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo to the Field Museum. Captured in Cameroon and traded for a stained-glass window, Bushman became the most popular civic figure in Chicago, kept behind glass in the zoo's Primate House. After his death, he was stuffed and placed in a glass case at the Field Museum. Told in rhyming verse, the fable follows his story through the making of Chicago — the slaughter of the bison, the stockyards of Packingtown, the reversal of the river, the World's Columbian Exposition, and the Plan of Chicago — to show how the climate crisis is written into the city's blueprint, from redlined neighborhoods to the toxic exposure carried by neighborhoods of color. It ends with a call to return the bison and the land and to break the glass cage.