Category: Events

New EPA Show at the UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art (Ent Center for the Arts), October 1 – 29, 2021

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Undesirable Plants Declare* brings the Environmental Performance Agency’s work to the unceded territory of the Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho Peoples, to investigate the diverse multispecies lifeways and teachings of spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds). Asking “In a time of ongoing pandemic crisis, how do we revalue what care means for all living beings?”, the exhibition shares and extends the EPA’s Multispecies Care Survey, a public engagement and data gathering initiative that aims to cultivate the co-generation of embodied, localized plant-human care practices. Launched during the height of the COVID-19 crisis, the Survey is an interactive web platform (multispecies.care) featuring a collection of participatory methods for attuning to vegetal perspectives and working with spontaneous urban plants as guides, collaborators, and mentors while social distancing. In the exhibition’s archive space, visitors can view video documentation of entries collected during the 2020-21 Survey cycle, explore the survey directly, and actively participate by engaging in a new protocol developed for this exhibition. 

In the entryway to the gallery, visitors are introduced to a delegation of EPA weedy plant experts from New York City, and invited to assist the EPA in assessing the capabilities and wisdom of local “undesirable” plant expert Spotted Knapweed (Centaurea maculosa). Through this Public Review with Knapweed, the EPA asks: What are the qualities, perspectives, skills, and relations that Knapweed can bring to the EPA? Participate in public fieldwork by listening, observing, and moving with urban plants, then share your sensorial experiences and Knapweed knowledge on the collaborative Public Review Diagram in the gallery.

The EPA will ultimately use this research in drafting a new piece of policy, The Multispecies Act. This Act aims to offer a set of embodied, actionable principles for centering spontaneous urban plant life as one means (among many) of contending with the failure of our environmental regulatory apparatus to deliver policy that promotes reciprocal relations between human and nonhuman life.

* The term “undesirable plant” comes from the Colorado Springs Code of Ordinances, section “9.6.314 Undesirable Plant Management,” which identifies Leafy spurge (Euphorbia esula), Diffuse knapweed (Centaurea diffusa), Russian knapweed (Centaurea repens), Spotted knapweed (Centaurea maculosa), and Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) as undesirable weeds located on public,  private or city land, and subject to control or eradication (In accord with Colorado Revised Statutes section 35-5.5-108). “Control” means preventing an undesirable plant from forming viable seeds or vegetative propagules. Those who harbor or maintain undesirable plants are declared to be a public nuisance.

NYC Delegation: Plant Expert Biographies

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Events

The EPA is participating in NODE Forum for Digital Arts, exploring artmaking and creative practice in times of ecological crisis.

For the festival, the EPA is developing a series of four new Multispecies Care Survey protocols to engage NODE participants and organizers. This season of the survey will focus on informal greenspace, like street verges and tree pits, exploring how relationships of care and control play out among the lifeforms who inhabit or interact with these interstitial spaces. Participants will engage in outdoor activities and multisensorial data collection prompted by the Multispecies Care Survey protocols and deepened through virtual embodied workshop gatherings and discussions. Together we will ask, what do the spontaneous plants in your community know, and how can we learn to listen to them? Along the way we will address and investigate how land use, management and maintenance policies at the state and city level impact questions around multispecies solidarity and ecosocial justice throughout the world. 

Plus join us for the following panel discussion on October 7, 2020 | 3 – 4:30pm EDT.

Making Kin: Resilience through Multispecies Care and Co-Existence

Both the pandemic and the climate crisis are lessons on human hubris—our failure to recognize planetary interdependencies and that we’re not above but a part of the biosphere. Ecofeminist icon Donna Haraway reminds us that “if we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism then we know that becoming is always becoming with, in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake.” Building more resilient futures will require a new multispecies perspective that is grounded in kinship and connection. We need to challenge delusions of separation and open up the frames of what matters to us, in part by recognizing what matters to others. But how do we expand our circle of empathy? How do we develop hybrid, embodied, and multi-sensorial languages to communicate across species boundaries? And how can we engage and mobilize the general public around issues of multispecies care and coexistence?

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The EPA was at the Climate Strike in NYC this past week in solidarity with multispecies networks making life possible for all of us. EPA agent Andrea Haenggi led a moss movement score to bring nonhumans into the march. Moss hands for climate justice!

This October, the EPA piloted the first iteration of Embodied Scientist Parkour, a training for interspecies communication and deepened relationships with the in-between landscapes of the Schuylkill River. Reimagining a conventional fitness course, the project invites participants to engage in a series of site-specific movement scores situated along the Grays Ferry Crescent Trail to expand the possibility of how we collect and co-generate embodied scientific data. In collaboration with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, we facilitated a soft-launch of the Parkour Course inviting participants to entangle their bodies with wild urban plants, vibrate with the multispecies highway, and develop new forms of intimacy with the river’s edge. (#embodiedscientist) Above is documentation of our workshop in Grays Ferry.

The EPA is featured in NURTUREart’s 2018–2019 Exhibition Season in a exhibition called The Department of Human and Natural Services, curated by Mariel Villere. The show will feature artworks by Nancy Nowacek, Allison Rowe, Li Sumpter, and the Environmental Performance Agency (EPA)

More about the show:
The Department of Human and Natural Services presents alternative arrangements of the bureaucracy surrounding climate change and possibilities to reclaim agency for environmental justice and resilience. The exhibition is comprised of works by four artists/collectives that propose strategies and actions in response to the current course of global warming. The project is a platform for visitors to envision their own future and a bureau, or a point of exchange for these visions, their material outputs, and a place to borrow or share resources in a new climatic reality.
Opening reception: Friday, April 19, 7-9pm
On view: April 20–May 19, 2019

On Sunday July 1st, the Environmental Performance Agency, in collaboration with Dan Phiffer, launched a new iteration of OnBehalfof.Life! This time we’re focused on gathering public comments in response to Scott Pruitt’s proposed “transparency” rule. You can participate online at OnBehalfof.Life or visit our gallery installation in the Bronx at Wave Hill’s exhibition Ecological Consciousness: Artist as Instigator. On the evening of August 1st we’ll host a workshop for those interested in submitting comments together on site at Wave Hill!

This weekend EPA agents Catherine Grau, andrea haenggi and Christopher Kennedy led a performative field study exploring the agency of spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds) found on Swale and the surrounding borderlands of the Brooklyn Army Terminal. We discovered an rhizomatic network of knotweed breaking up the recently paved asphalt, aquatic weeds growing on the hull of the barge, a multispecies food forest, and feral shorelines among other things.