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?
