Ecotopian Toolmakers Workshop Series: Artist Talk with the Environmental Performance Agency, "Plant Talk/Human Talk: Scores for Cross Species Interaction"
626 Williams Hall
Drawing on previous work and leading up to their Embodied Scientist Parkour to be held along the Schuylkill River October 19, the Environmental Performance Agency will share how they use scores to explore gaps and confluences in “language” across life forms, confronting questions of agency,
performativity, and rootedness in the context of global climatic shifts and rapid urbanization.
The Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) is an artist collective founded in 2017 and named in response to the proposed defunding of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Appropriating the acronym EPA, the collective’s primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms environment, performance, and agency – using artistic, social, and embodied / kinesthetic practices to advocate for the agency of all living performers co-creating our environment, specifically through the lens of spontaneous urban plants, native or migrant. Current EPA Agents include Catherine Grau, andrea haenggi, Ellie Irons, Christopher Kennedy, and spontaneous urban plants.
Catherine Grau is a Queens-based artist and EPA agent. In her predominantly collaborative practice, she fosters embodied research methodologies, collective experiences and intimate encounters that aim to generate processes of de-colonizing and unlearning anthropocentric paradigms.
Andrea Haenggi has a research-based creative practice she calls Ethnochoreobotanography that employs her roles as a choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, dancer, radical care sitter, somatic educator and EPA agent. Her sensual-bodily-tough works confront audiences with a world beyond humans.
Christopher Lee Kennedy is an EPA agent, transdisciplinary artist and educator who creates site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of ‘Nature’ and the biocultural possibility of interspecies agency and collaboration.
Ellie Irons is an artist, educator, and EPA-agent based in Brooklyn & Troy, NY. She works in a variety of media, from drawing to gardening, to reveal how human and nonhuman lives intertwine with ecological systems. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Electronic Arts at RPI in Troy, NY.