A recent unearthing of a suitcase buried in the EPA’s urban weeds garden has revealed surfaces covered in lichen and fungi. We’re currently investigating what species are present and will keep you posted.
lichen textures and fungi treasures
fertilizing fire circle: exposing the soil
The fertilizing fire circle pit is taking shape – all the soft openings and earth exposures to crack the asphalt and patriarchy. Join us Friday December 1st (5pm – 11:59pm) for all the stories and healing. RSVP for the event at fertilizingfirecircle.eventbrite.com!
Soft Precarious Openings
The Soft Precarious Openings space is coming together with a special installation by andrea haenggi. Get an up close view and encounter on December 1st!
fertilizing fire circle
DECEMBER 1, 2017 | 5pm – 12am @ EPA Headquarters 1067 Pacific Street, Brooklyn
We invite you to join EPA collective’s night of embodied storytelling for decolonizing, healing and belonging within a multi-species future. Celebrate the final transformation of our rented garage and lot turned urban weeds ecosystem.**
Break the pavement. Practice primitive fire-starting. Whisper and listen to the flames to fertilize relationships with urban land. Bitch and dance to acknowledge the agency of urban weeds. Counter monoculture! Burn it down! Touch stillness. See time.
Beginning at dusk and continuing until midnight, the environment will be transformed into Soft-Precarious Openings by EPA artists Catherine Grau, Andrea Haenggi, Christopher Kennedy, Ellie Irons, and participating artists and storytellers: Carrie Ahern, Tara Daino, Nancye Good (fire bow drill teacher), Simone Johnson, Holes in the Walls Collective: Julia Meeks & Dhira Rauch, Cooper Miller, Robert Neuwirth, Lissette Olivares, Iele Paloumpis, Marýa Wethers (firekeeper), and Moira Williams, and nourishing bites and warming drinks inspired by recipe-stories from the neighbors on our block.
Registration is required. Please RSVP
Suggested donation $15
Detailed schedule TBA
+++ Stay the full 7hrs to get fully fertilized for the next epoch!! +++
** In 2013, artist Andrea Haenggi and writer Robert Neuwirth signed a 5-year lease for 1067 Pacific Street, a former auto-repair garage with a 1900 Sq Ft vacant lot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with the intent:
- to find LOVE in this contaminated urban feral landscape
- if you enter the LAND of 1067 Pacific Street, you shape the artwork
- the PLACE, 1067 Pacific Street, is the artwork itself
- the artwork is the studio for Haenggi’s movement-based artist PRACTICE
- to find an aesthetic in rawness and LABOR
- in search of AGENCY for nonhuman life forms
- to question VALUE in all its economic and philosophic meanings
The socially and ecologically engaged research and performance artwork, with its many public encounters, grew into the co-founding of the collaborative project Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) in March 2017. On January 22, 2018 we must surrender the key.
Mapping the US EPA: Sensing the Bureaucracy, Who Has Agency?
This weekend the EPA hosted a research-a-thon to better understand and sense the federal environmental bureaucracy, the US EPA*.
Since US EPA administrator Scott Pruitt took office in 2017, a number of environmental regulations and policies have been overturned, rolled back, or are in a period of limbo. With a further “re-organization” of the US EPA already underway, what implications does this have for human health and the environment?
Collectively we began to review the US EPA’s 2018-2022 Strategic Plan and map how the US EPA operates both locally and nationally. Together we discovered that the the US EPA** is accepting public comments until October 31, 2017 on the 2018-2022 Strategic Plan, which redefines their mission for the next four years. We feel the strategic plan does not adequately ensure the “protection” of human health and the environment.
With the help of EPA** Agents and friends, we developed a resource that invites you to submit a comment on behalf of a nonhuman species called onbehalfof.life
We encourage you to share this tool with your networks, on social media, and through conversation with friends, colleagues and family.
In a time of extinction we need to make space for more life.
*US EPA = United States Environmental Protection Agency
**EPA = Environmental Performance Agency (No affiliation with the US EPA)
Asphalt Rupture: Breaking Through
Last week at the EPA we dug deep. And broke through some asphalt in the urban weeds garden.
The action was partly inspired by an improv movement workshop that we organized this summer called CRACK the Patriarchy — where we traced the cracks in the asphalt and starting to think about our own bodies as a radicle that can get into all the openings where weeds push through. The movement and conversation from the workshop got us thinking about notions of value, comfort/discomfort, maintenance, emotional labor, healing and care, cultivation and gender.
It was quite satisfying to break through. The asphalt is actually really spongey and malleable when you get down an inch or so. Almost like a thick cake or membrane. When the soil was exposed we placed our hands on the surface together and speculated on what seeds will take root. The square of asphalt was placed on each EPA agents chest to feel the literal weight of the ground on our bodies. We’ll keep you posted on any developments.
Weedy Dance
A video project documenting some improvisational movement in the urban weeds garden created by Daniel Wirtheim and featuring EPA Agents andrea haenggi, Catherine Grau and Christopher Kennedy.
Making Time for Soil
“…testing soil as “tasting soil,” treating soil as family, notions of immersing into soil and comingling with its substance, speak of sensorial involvements with a soil that is not conceived as separate.” – Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds by María Puig de la Bellacasa, p. 197-98
This month’s collective weed improvisation jam explored urban soil as a platform for movement research and weedy agency. Special guest Moira Williams shared a little bit about her practice and reflected on a past project called DIRT Shirt/EXCHANGE where Williams germinated Hairy Vetch seeds in her armpit as a means to address contaminated soil in a Brownfield site in Brooklyn. Moira guided us through a collaborative score to embody what it means to be soil, to be in soil, and to make soil. We explored the urban weeds garden and dug a hole to investigate the soil’s texture and quality. The event ended with an open movement jam.
Embodied Mapping with NYU Students
Nick Mirzoeff’s Media and Environment students from NYU visited the EPA this week. Together we explored embodied mapping strategies to better understand our relationship to urban weeds and multispecies entanglements! Shown above is a full body transect to begin measuring the amount of impervious surface area in the garden.