The LEAF Episode 1: Show and Tells from FRIEC Collective Artists

Olive Bieringa, Oslo.  Matthew Jensen, New York.  Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, Paris. 
8 October 2020

Many voices. Greener cities. Better cities.

Want to explore diverse and connecting threads in urban ecological arts? In the LEAF, three FRIEC Urban Arts Collective members share something from their ideas and work for 10 minutes each, followed by Q&A.

Presenters: 
Olive Bieringa, Oslo
Matthew Jensen, New York
Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, Paris

21 October, 11am EDT 

Olive Bieringa, Oslo: “Resisting Extinction” is a performance work that will offer embodied practices for grieving and resisting extinction amidst our spiraling ecological devastation. This performance work will offer participatory practices for building relationship and agency through weather walks, grieving practices and hauntings in urban landscape with the land meets the water.

Matthew Jensen, New York:  I will share a few recent projects that help unpack what I mean when I say I have a “walking-based practice”. I will touch on Tree Love: Street Trees and Stewardship in NYC and show a few iterations of the project. And I will quickly explain the first and only “virtual walk” I created for City as Living Laboratory during the pandemic. The piece takes a walk and spreads it out on StoryMap, an interactive map with video and text. 

Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, Paris: I will present about an ongoing body of research on what I’ve coined “the permacircular museum”. It revolves around gestures of object maintenance, looking at expanding the field of museum care practices to ecosystems and non-human collectives. There are currently two field experiments: in Karlsruhe, with ZKM museum of art and media – we are regenerating an abandoned fruit orchard, in the framework of the exhibition Critical Zones; in Taipei, with Taipei Fine Arts Museum – an urban reforestation action in partnership with Taipei Forestry Technologist Association and Geotechnical Engineering Office. I’m keen to explore the question recently asked by curator Chus Martinez on the possibility for cultural institutions to “produce shelter”, in a time characterized by the disappearance of refuges (Haraway, Tsing).

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The FRIEC (Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures) Urban Ecological Arts Collective is a global group of almost 100 artists and creatives interested in the connection between nature and people in cities. The LEAF is a monthly webinar in which three Collective members spend 10 minutes describing an ideas or motivation central to their work, followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. The idea to get to know the work of the Collective members, and to explore creativity and imagination in urban ecology. 

Interested in being part of the FRIEC Collective? Write is at [email protected].
 
Banner image: A photographic series by Matthew Jensen celebrating the myriad of ways city residents care for street trees and the spaces surrounding them.
Matthew Jensen

About the Writer:
Matthew Jensen

Matthew Jensen is an interdisciplinary artist whose rigorous explorations of landscape combine walking, collecting, photography, mapping and extensive research. His projects investigate the relationships between people and local landscapes.

Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro

About the Writer:
Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro

Stéphane Verlet Bottéro (b. 1987) is an artist working at the intersection of social practice, installation, education, writing, gardening, and cooking. He is interested in the entanglements of community, materiality, body, and place. Based on site-specific research and durational interventions, his practice seeks to open spaces to unlearn and unsettle ways of inhabiting the world.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Olive Bieringa

About the Writer:
Olive Bieringa

Olive Bieringa is a dance maker, somatic movement therapist, and cultural producer originally from New Zealand who currently lives in Oslo. She received her dance education at European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands and completed her MFA in Performance and New Media from Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY.

Olive Bieringa

Olive Bieringa

Olive Bieringa is a dance maker, somatic movement therapist, and cultural producer originally from New Zealand who currently lives in Oslo. She received her dance education at European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands and completed her MFA in Performance and New Media from Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of Somatic Education Australasia running Body-Mind Certification programs in Melbourne, Australia beginning in 2019. For over twenty years she codirects the BodyCartography Project with Otto Ramstad, whose mission is to engage with the vital materiality of our bodies to create live performance that facilitates a re-enchantment of embodiment, relationship, and presence. They have created performances, installations, films, workshops, talks, festivals and curatorial projects around the world presented by institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Performance Space 122, American Realness, NYC, Guggenheim, Berlin, Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Performance Arcade, Wellington, and recently had a piece acquired by Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand.