The Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) is an artist collective founded in 2017 and named in response to the ongoing rollback of Federal environmental policy at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Appropriating the acronym EPA, the collective’s primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms environment, performance, and agency – using artistic, social, and embodied / kinesthetic 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.
Current EPA Agents include Catherine Grau, an artist and Public Programs Coordinator at the Queens Museum, andrea haenggi, an artist/choreographer and faculty at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, Ellie Irons, an artist and PhD Candidate at RPI, Christopher Kennedy, an artist and Assistant Director at the Urban Systems Lab at the New School University, and spontaneous urban plants.
Andrea Haenggi (she/her), Swiss-born, is breathing and working at this moment in Lenapehoking — now called Brooklyn, New York. Calling on plants as her guides, teachers, mentors and performers, her dance and ecosocial art/fieldwork practice creates a form of theater called Ethnochoreobotanography, which simultaneously explores issues regarding decolonization, ecology, feminism, power, labor and care.
Christopher Kennedy is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. With a background in environmental engineering, Kennedy re-imagines field science techniques and new forms of storytelling to develop embodied research, installations, sculptures, and publications that examine conventional notions of “Nature,” interspecies agency, and biocultural collaboration.
Ellie Irons is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn and Troy, New York. Working across media, from watercolor to re-wilding experiments, her practice combines socially engaged art and ecology fieldwork. Recent work involves collaborations focused on spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds), including co-founding the Next Epoch Seed Library and the Environmental Performance Agency. Irons received a BA from Scripps College in Los Angeles and an MFA from Hunter College, NY. She is currently a PhD candidate in arts practice Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, focusing on how critical ecosocial art contributes to the struggle for multispecies solidarity in an age of climate chaos and mass extinction.
Artemisia vulgaris (common mugwort) community organizer representing the urban spontaneous plants and says : It is sensational to be smelly – be hazy — be tasty – be dreamy – be blurry – be green – be silver –be juicy – be fragile – be resilient – be vulnerable – be loud – be unnoticed –be overwhelming –be everywhere – To affect – be affected – To have no self-expression- To need light – water – touch – wind – rain – microorganisms – It is sensational – To be fluid – changeable – unpredictable – invasive– persistent – resilient – sharp. It is sensational to be a rhizome. It is sensational that you make me a stranger in the street -> an immigrant -> an alien -> a healer -> a smuggler -> with no passport
