Description:
Green Ribbon/Green Thumb
Under the Holocene logics of Enlightened Man, those of us diagnosed by Western biomedical experts as clinically insane—deemed mad and monstrous—are too often pushed to the margins of rationalocentric society: banished from the commonwealth. So we—the mad and monstrous—gather around our various diagnoses and attempt to form new commons. Turning away from the injustices of the Holocene and towards the creative possibilities of the Chthulucene—the age of monsters—we reclaim our monstrous madness as a radical form of multispecies relationality and establish more caring and empathetic support networks for all lifeforms. What follows is an auto-ethnographic account of a bipolar manic episode which I use as the entry point for crip chthonic storytelling for multispecies thriving. Drawing from environmental disability studies, feminist technoscience, and decolonial approaches to environ/mental health, I ask: How can the reconfiguration of care beyond the disease model of mental illness contribute to an understanding of environ/mental health and wellbeing beyond the human? Inspired by mood and habit tracking—a therapeutic journaling tool that bipolar patients and their care providers employ to better understand, manage, and prevent “disordered” mood episodes—and gardening diaries—in which gardeners track the hopes, dreams, and performance of their plots through the seasons—I share the following journal entries as a field (garden) experiment in radical relationality that seeks to cultivate a sustainable commoning praxis for (crip) life in the Chthulucene. Through this art-science intervention, I posit an understanding of bipolarity that is situated: a bio-psycho-socio-ecological phenomenon that grounds, transforms, and transcends the human.
Location:
Hampton Roads, VA; Washington, DC; online
Project Duration:
1 Month
Description:
Sandy De/Compositions
A more-than-human, community-based art-science intervention happening on a beach near you.
Location:
Chesapeake Bay
Project Duration:
1 year +
Description:
Greening our Thumbs: a zine about people and plant relations
Plants and people meet in the garden. Whether this meeting takes place in a bedroom (spider plants on a bedside table), the backyard (black-eyed Susans in a sunny border/vegetable patch), or the bush (where some people gather their food), plants and people care for one another; sometimes in unexpected ways. We understand gardens to be formal and informal interspecific places where life meets to share stories, exchange dreams, and germinate new imaginaries and relations. In this space at this time of climate crisis, we explore multispecies flourishing by framing the garden as a narrative space to both think through intellectually as scholars and to work in with our hands as gardeners. Above all, relations of care are established in every garden between species and they are constantly negotiated and captured in narrative culture. Too little care and the garden succumbs to neglect. Too much care and a fragile root system declines from overwatering. As this experimental project has found, myriad questions and quandaries come to the fore when species meet in the garden.
Exploring both the practice of gardening and the practice of zine making, we have collected and curated stories, artworks, and personal and collective experiences of people and plants coming together in a variety of gardens in the USA and Australia. In making and distributing an A3 single page zine, we have sought to engender generative ways to deepen our collective understanding of people/plant relations and raise broader questions from our own practice as gardeners/scholars. Growing content from friends, colleagues, and gardeners, iterations of our zine show how people and plants care for one another. We argue the act of gardening can develop multi-species ethics for collective interspecies thriving. We also argue that caring for or tending to plants (or planning a garden) can be a radical and/or political act. As a narrative practice, crafting gardens and zines alike highlight and honor embodied/tacit knowledge, skill, and applied and speculative design. By focusing on multi-species relations, we break down the subject-object binary of understanding who and what we study. We reconsider plants not only as instrumentally useful objects, but also as research partners and collaborators, as teachers of scientific, philosophical, and practical lessons for a more caring or nuanced way of relating to each other across species. Gardening and zine-making also contribute directly to lowering carbon footprints by growing our own food and encouraging carbon negative planting activities.
Location:
USA; Australia; Germany
Project Duration:
6 Months
Description:
Dance Your Diasporic DNA
Maps chart more than static bodies of land in space. They can also chart the movement of bodies out of and into other spaces. / Los mapas trazan más que cuerpos de tierra estáticos en el espacio. También pueden trazar el movimiento de los cuerpos desde y hacia otros espacios. / This movement makes maps much more unstable than they might initially appear. / Este movimiento hace que los mapas sean mucho más inestables de lo que podrían parecer inicialmente. / In this interactive performance piece, participants will engage with two kinds of maps: the human genome and dance routines for the video game Beat Saber. / En esta presentación interactiva, los participantes interactúan con dos tipos de mapas: el genoma humano y las rutinas de baile del juego de video Beat Saber. Al hacerlo, exploraremos los pasos de movimiento genéticos-ancestrales e historias coloniales a través de varios estilos de danza diaspóricos. / In doing so, we will explore genetic-ancestral movement patterns and colonial histories through various diasporic dance styles.
Client:
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Project Duration:
3 Months
Item Origin:
Japan, Mid-1800’s
Lissette Lorenz 