I Will Never Know This Garden (artist collaborative with Andrea Frank, Amanda Heidel, Michael Asbill)

We propose a collaborative presentation which weaves together video projection, performance, and spoken word (field notes, critical writings). We will guide the audience through philosophical thought experiments, research findings, and experiences. The enclosed video, “What Remains,” of slow burning carbonized paper Is a scaffold which will be augmented with other visual content and serve as an interactive backdrop for the performance.

This collective uses experiential artistic research strategies to explore a new paradigm, and to establish deep connections with each other and the world around us. These are developed in response to the recognition that a cerebral approach to understanding scientific knowledge pertaining to the far reaching and terrifying effects of the global climate crisis cannot shake us out of our collective apathy.

Our weekly sessions are focused on a core and fundamental shift toward integrating intuitive and sensory strategies into our artist/activist practice. These strategies are borrowed from art, theater, Native American practices, and psychology and include body work, slow sensory walks, and systemic constellations. These experimental transdisciplinary methods open channels that are clogged by cultural norms rooted in capitalist and individualist approaches to the environment and one another.

The new territory we are exploring offers an embodied knowledge of groundedness and deep enmeshment in everything around us. It generates a resilient long-term view into our past and future, and is solidly rooted in the present moment. This manifests as a gradual shift in priorities that we experience as we struggle to create pathways to emerge from our collective numbness.