Sense: Dimensions of Radical Ecology

A day of ecoperformance, lectures, workshops, and installations at La Plaza Cultural, urban amphitheater and permaculture garden in Alphabet City founded by Buckminster Fuller and Gordon Matta-Clark.

SENSE was part of the 5th annual LUNGS (Loisaida Neighborhood Gardens Festival) a large-scale civic event activating all of the community gardens throughout the Lower East Side.

Installations by
Ross Schaner
Annie Doran
Cadillac Project
12-1
Wellness workshops and warmup w/Emerita Torres
12-230 PM
Permaculture tours w/ Ross Martin, Executive Director of La Plaza Cultural, w/Marga Snyder.
230-4 PM Decentralized Infrastructure: Lecture and Demonstration by Stewart Losee
4-5PM Live performance: "BRIDE" by Theresa Byrnes
5-6PM Panel Discussion: Art, Activism, Ecology
Felicia Young, Chloe Rossetti Anna Fitzgerald
6-7PM SENSE A Play About Permaculture, by Chloe Rossetti, with costumes by Ala Dehghan.
7-930 Dinner and performances by
Susannah Simpson
Jamie Buxton
Athena LLewellyn
Joro Boro
Mary Keena Frisbee
(Joro & Keena)
and more
Founded in 1976, by Gordon Matta-Clark and Buckminster Fuller, along with local activists, La Plaza Cultural Community Garden is a unique, multi-space green space: an urban amphitheater/perfomance venue, permaculture site, and wilderness preserve.
Now in its fifth year, LUNGS (Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens), is a nonprofit organization founded to promote, protect and preserve the community gardens on the Lower East Side.
SENSE (by Chloe Rossetti, with costumes by Ala Dehghan) is an eco-performance about a permacultural intentional community, based in a homestead in New York, that receives and adapts to an invading family of primal scream therapists. It is also a play about how to live in the Anthropocene, where civilization as we-know-it must change-or-die as the old way collapses.
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Theresa Byrnes (http://www.theresabyrnes.com/) began to exhibit her paintings in 1986 at the age of 16. She has had over 25 solo shows at spaces including Saatchi & Saatchi in New York and Sydney, Cristianne Nienaber Contemporary Art NYC, the Australian Embassy in Washington D.C., and many others. Her performance work, which often deals with environmental concerns, has been called "both visceral and fragile at the same time...painful, poignant, and pointed. It is Yves Klein meets Chris Burden."

Ross Schaner is an artist and designer based in Brooklyn. Through an understanding of the spirituality of nature and its language, he works to present codes and symbols of the subconscious in many contexts.

Ross Martin is the Executive Director of La Plaza Cultural, and has been its landscape architect for two decades. He also designs, builds, and maintains high-end residential gardens and green rooftops in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Annie Doran (http://www.anniedoran.com/) is a writer, puppeteer, performer and event planner living in Brooklyn, NY. She writes for numerous blogs and magazines about a variety of topics, especially the environment, social justice, the performing arts, and gender. Her book of poetry, "Dance the Spider Away," was published in 2014 by Honeybee Press.
Felicia Young (http://www.earthcelebrations.com/about/about-felicia-young/) is a social action artist and the Founder/Executive Director of Earth Celebrations, a non-profit organization founded on the Lower East Side in 1991, engaging communities to effect ecological and social change through the arts. She has initiated broad-base citywide coalitions and collaborative partnerships bringing together organizations, academic and cultural institutions, municipalities, government officials, schools, community centers, neighborhood associations, artists and local residents to work together on common goals, mobilize action, develop solutions and impact change.
Chloé Rossetti (http://artforum.com/contributors/name=chloe-rossetti) is an artist, writer, performer, energy healer, and permaculturist based in New York City. Her work, most recently under the header of Radical Nourishment, focuses on the intersection of ecology, collectivism, agency, feminism, and love.
Stewart Losee (http://stewartlosee.com/fabrication/) is an architect, designer, and visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work focuses on "decentralized infrastructure" as a mode of user empowerment and social justice. Notable projects include TetraHouse (a building module that allows users construct a small house then change it, move it, expand it or sell it;), Geomancy Lantern, Wilderness, and Plazasphere.
Anna Fitzgerald (http://www.familiarsquarterly.com/) is a Brooklyn-based writer, producer and editor, is the author of the book of poetry "Things the Earth Did," and founder of Familiars Quarterly, a journal of art and literature exploring interdependence with non-human others. Its current issue, out in late September, concerns the kingdom Animalia, while issue 3 is themed around "Ecosystems."
Ala Dehghan (http://www.aladehghan.net/), is visual artis from Tehran, Iran, currently based in NYC. She has exhibited solo projects at Otto Zoo Gallery, Milano; Kalfayan Galleries, Athens; and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze Magazine, Art F City, The Drawing Center and ATP Diary among others. Her practice is a complex process of collage, assemblage, and montage. She collects and archives a constellation of images and information. Each work grows during the process of subtraction, removal, lamination, separation, and displacement. They are layered, filtered and stacked to create a new lens to perceive the psychological, political and social undercurrents.

Susannah Simpson (http://www.susannahsimpson.com/performance/) is a multi-disciplinary artist from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She works primarily in performance and poetry, and is a co-founder of the feminist spiritual community Moon Church. She recently published her first collection of poems, I'LL GIVE IT TO YOU. In New York she has performed at Dance New Amsterdam, the Museum of Moving Images, Body Actualized Center, and the Whitney Museum as part of the Clitney Perennial. Additionally, she performs at venues and art spaces throughout the city, US, and abroad and in Spring 2016 took her performance piece WARM WOMEN on a national tour. She teaches yoga and improvisational dance, and co-leads a workshop called Women’s Rejuvenation Circle dedicated to female healing and empowerment through connection to the body and sexuality.


Joro-Boro
Joro-Boro is a producer and DJ primarily interested in musical genres that circuit bend the archaic and the futuristic and that short circuit cultural flows. This aesthetic informs his work resulting in dirty hybrids of local musics: crunk cumbia, capoeira moombahcore, Balkan brass juke, etc. As a DJ, Joro-Boro has repeatedly performed with Bassnectar, has toured with Balkan Beat Box, and has performed with ?uestlove, An-Ten-Nae, Beats Antique, Boban Markovic, David Starfire, Dimond Saints, DJ Shawna, DJ Spooky, Eliot Lipp, Fanfare Ciocarlia, Filastine, Method Man, Omar Souleyman, Talib Kweli, The Human Experience, Uproot Andy and others. As a performance and installation artist, Joro-Boro works with sound and video to address problems of representation, myth, immediacy, and authenticity. He has a BA in Social and Historical Inquiry from the New School in New York and has pursued studies in philosophy at Sofia University in Bulgaria and Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, MA.
Mary Frisbee is an architect and artist exploring how architecture and spatial infrastructure can lead to social change. As an architect she focuses her work in infrastructure for play, healing, home, and exchange; as an artist she creates experiential environments to open up the mind to new perspectives and ways. Working for two years as a designer at Rafael de Cardenas//Architecture at Large, provided an opportunity to design for high end residential, commercial, and exhibition spaces and learn the design landscape of NYC. Mary has traveled extensively through South and Central America tapping into the ancient knowledge of these lands and learning from self sustaining and indigenous communities.

Joro & Keena
Joro & Keena is a sound project exploring the intersection of sound and meditation, presence and movement.
Joro & Keena grows further the practice of sound meditation. While usually in sound meditations only unstructured sounds (chanting, didgeridoo, singing bowls, binaural beats) are used for their direct effect on the brain and nervous systems, this project uses the participants' ingrained familiarity with basic beat patterns to provide a comfortable container for extended mental focus and stillness. This makes the project a great introduction to meditation for people who are usually intimidated by the idea of quieting the mind while sitting still.
The bass ritual events go beyond performance to create a common space of “we” where pure acoustic sources are layered with samples, deep electronic sub-bass, and participatory breathing and chanting. The result is a collective experience of a wider range of frequencies, textures and timbres which augment the gradient of bodily affects, while relying on an overall minimal aesthetic.
Cadillac Project is an amalgamated and shifting collective, founded in New York City, who come together around a concept, idea or theme and create a unique installation, set of performances, or visual art for each date on which the CADDILAC PROJECT convenes. Each project is tailored to its environment like a custom low rider caddy with a shine of fresh wax.