Christopher Kennedy and The Environmental Performance Agency
By Sara Roma
Christopher Kennedy is an agent and cofounder of the Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) as well as Artist, Designer and Assistant Director at the Urban Systems Lab at the The New School and Lecturer at the Parsons School of Design, New York. The EPA is an art collective that uses artistic, social, and embodied practices to advocate for the agency of all living performers co-creating our environment—specifically through the lens of spontaneous urban plants, native or migrant. Other EPA members include Catherine Grau, Andrea Haenggi, Ellie Irons, and spontaneous urban plants.
We met Christopher through Laguna Gloria’s new program series “A Walk in the Park” where the EPA led an interactive movement workshop exploring the wild ecologies of Laguna Gloria Sculpture Garden.
Multispecies Care Booklet from "Learn to Love Weeds", brought to you by The Contemporary Austin, as part of the 2021 Walk in the Park series. (Photo by Sara Roma)
Sara Roma (SR): How did the EPA come about?
Christopher Kennedy (CK): We were really catalyzed by the 2016 presidential election. As soon as (we heard) the information about what was going to happen with the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, under Trump and Scott Pruitt—the administrator at the time—we got incredibly, as you can imagine, frustrated. After protesting in the streets for many, many months, we realized that while it was an amazing outlet, it may not be sufficient long term (or) really responding to some of the attacks towards different kinds of policies and funding that protect water and land and air quality across the US. And so we decided to come together.
My friend and collaborator Andrea Haenggi, one of the co-founders of the EPA, had converted an old auto-shop into a dance studio in Crown Heights, Brooklyn focused on ecologically engaged research and performance. So we met there in the winter of 2017. She had a little furnace… I don’t know how she got permission to have a fire in the middle of the city [laughs].
We were all like, oh my god what are we going to do? I told the group, I think that we need to make our own EPA. We then collectively decided to center the voice and wisdom of the urban plants, specifically weeds. Thinking of them as these kinds of guides and collaborators.
So we operated out of Andrea’s studio space, this nineteen hundred square foot repair shop that had been crumbling, you know, asphalt, weeds. This became the starting point to invite other people, communities, and organisms into a conversation about what a more aspirational EPA could be.
And so we started to develop projects and practices, mostly movement and dance and all different kinds of ways of interacting with the world and really trying to imagine, like, a different way of talking about environmental activism and policy, specifically in urban areas.
Our mission had been to catalyze conversation, but also to get people out onto the streets themselves, physically, to look at plants together. And in that process, a lot of things start to transform in terms of people's thinking
EPA Summit 2017 by Timothy Sean O’Connell
SR: What was the process like creating the Walk Through: Learn to Love the Weeds, at Laguna Gloria? What did you prioritize when designing the experience?
CK: My friend and collaborator Ann Armstrong invited me to join this walking series. She was broadly asked to respond to the landscape of Laguna and invite artists to come and interpret. As a member of the EPA, I'm always thinking about the edges and the margins and the weedy sort of species that we often overlook. So that was a really good starting point for me.
I set up a meeting with the horticulturalist, the primary gardener on the site, Liz Brewer. And I was like “Liz, take me to every place you do not want people to go. Where are the most interesting spots in terms of your work?” She took me on this two hour long walk. And along the way, I was just kind of asking her questions about, you know, her perspective on invasive species, on stewardship and how to care for a place.
Photo by Ann Armstrong. "Learn to Love Weeds" was brought to you by The Contemporary Austin, as part of the 2021 Walk in the Park series.
CK: After the walk I chose four or five stops along the way for us to really engage with and then have a conversation about. I really wanted to think of how we could reimagine our gaze towards unwanted species and unwanted spaces and disturbed landscapes. To open up the conversation about how we think about healing and caring, and the more-than-human relationships, especially in this time of mass extinction. There’s a focus on doing fun movement exercises to really just kind of get ourselves out of our brains into our bodies. And remember that we're here in flesh and in relationship with other organisms.
SR: How was the walk through similar to other work the EPA has done?
CK: During Covid we launched an online project called the Multispecies Care Survey, which was a public art project reimagined as a website that serves as an active archive of embodied, localized plant-human care practices. We thought a lot about some of the protocols we had designed for that when planning the walk. One of the first Spring Protocols of the Multispecies Care Survey was the simple action of washing our windows together, you know, on a Zoom call. So we could start watching birds and plants come to life in the spring.
EPA Multispecies Care Survey Spring Protocol 01
CK: One of the scores, or protocols during the Laguna Gloria walk invited people to pair off, one laying on their belly looking at the plants and the other looking at the sky. Having a moment to have your belly touch the earth, I think is just so nice. And then being able to translate that to a person looking at a different vantage point.
We did a similar thing in New York City. There's (sic) a lot of places where you can't look over the fence. And so we're like, let's take a ladder. We carried ladders around, pretty tall ladders, and would set them up and then tell each other the plants we’re seeing over the fence in these vacant lots. It became a spectacle. It's New York. There's always so many people. I love when you can interrupt this daily consumer momentum. (For more info see the Urban Weeds Guide to Border Crossing).
EPA co-founder and agent Catherine Grau peering over a gate on Classon Avenue in Crown Heights Brooklyn (Photo by Chris Kennedy)
SR: What is the importance of language when addressing nature? Specifically during the walk thru you talked about how the official term for some of these plants is “Invasive Alien Species”?
CK: As an urban ecologist trained as an environmental engineer I’m very much in that world where there are very particular scientific terms. Many that have come out of these, you know, fields that have evolved over the decades. A lot of these terms have been created primarily by white men who decide, this is what we're going to call things. And a lot of it is inspired by antiquated sort of, I would say, bombastic war-like language.
So the official term that we use for things labeled as weeds is Invasive Alien Species. That's in the literature that's used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service here in the U.S. And there's (sic) a lot of connotations for the word “alien”—of course: “invader”. There is sort of an assumption that certain species are inherently bad and that they're trying to invade and take over landscapes when the primary issue is the human impact on the Earth's system, not necessarily plants.
Plants are the most dominant species on the planet, and yet they're often overlooked. There's a huge problem with plant blindness, people don't know the names of plants in their backyards. And so we sort of have this kind of, I think, legacy of overlooking particular organisms and assuming that they’re problems or pests and they're really just part of a complex multispecies tapestry.
Photo by Ann Armstrong. "Learn to Love Weeds" was brought to you by The Contemporary Austin, as part of the 2021 Walk in the Park series.
SR: What attracted you to art, specifically this performance-based workshop sort of art? You started out in Environmental Engineering, what was your early relationship with art like?
CK: I was always interested in the language. I got really obsessed with poetry when I was like an angsty teen, you know [laughs]. I went to Catholic school and it was very much forbidden. We didn’t have art classes offered. I found myself reading a lot of weird poetry texts. But my dad was very adamant about going to engineering school. That's the tradition in the family. So, I looked for what was the most progressive thing I could do within the field, which ended up being ecological engineering, which included a lot of design.
My thesis project proposed turning the football field on our campus into a wastewater treatment facility using plants. So basically like a living machine, because nobody really played football on our campus, so I was like let’s just use this green space and filter our poop.
Of course, it didn't get accepted. But that was the beginning of the arc. When I moved to NYC in 2004, it felt like a very pivotal time, it was the beginning of this kind of social practice phenomena. I lived in a studio space with tons of artists. And it was a moment of creating art with schools and community pop-up projects. That was sort of novel at the time. I got woven into one of those projects and it turned out to be really great. I was never really attracted to making an object sitting on the wall, although that's really important too. For me it was really about experience, people, and about research and site-specific response.
SR: What does the EPA have planned next? Will we see more of the multispecies care survey?
CK: Yes, actually, we're taking the hundreds of entries that we have gotten, all the different photos and audio and video clips from the Multispecies Care Survey website and creating an exhibition at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. It’s through a partnership with the university gallery. We're going to transform that space into kind of a physical analog version of the care survey website to tell the story of multispecies engagement during Covid.
Using that information we’re also drafting this kind of playful, speculative, policy that we call the Multispecies Act. As a response to the Endangered Species Act. The premise is basically, how do we create value and agency for all life forms? How do we bring them into policymaking, into decision making? What we need is multi species sustainability. How can we ensure that all ecosystems or organisms have the ability to thrive and flourish? That should be a central goal, not just human flourishing. It should be multi species flourishing. So what would a policy look like?
And then we're working on a more expanded set of plant guides that we're hoping to publish this year.
SR: How can people engage with the walk through? Will the booklets from “Learn to Love the Weeds” be accessible?
CK: Ann is going to be creating a booklet and map that sort of catalogs all the walks, around six total. That'll come out probably in the fall. And I think they’ll have a map you can take from the visitor center and participate with as you explore Laguna.
Follow Chris on Instagram at @artiscycle and the EPA on their site and @environmentalperformanceagency