Welcome to the Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures (FRIEC), a place to imagine and build cities that nurture humanity’s relationships with urban nature, through art and creative, cross-culture, cross-discipline collaboration. All of our projects try to fold art, science, and practice into unified collaborations.
See also our other projects, including: Art-Science-Practice Residencies (a project with the US Forest Service), Fiction, Poetry, and Graffiti. We also launched in June 2023 a comics series on Nature-Based Solutions.
Interested in joining the FRIEC urban artist collective?
Write us here: [email protected]
What is FRIEC?
We are a place for radical imagination
about what cities could be,
where artists and practitioners of all backgrounds
can come together to:
collaborate with each other,
cities, and nature
challenge the framework
of established knowledge
allow new ideas for sustaining cities
across disciplines, species, and ways of knowing
imagine collaborative movements for livable,
resilient, healthy, poetic cities and regions
in partnership with nature
FRIEC Exhibitions
Enjoy our latest exhibitions, featuring virtual and physical artistic collaborations across all borders.
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Reverberations
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Carmen Bouyer — Les savoirs vivent dans la terre // Knowledge is in the land
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Shade in the City
Rising Heat Inequity in a Sunburnt Era -
Nikki Lindt—The Underground Sound Project
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Nikki Lindt—If The Trees Speak to Us, How Will We Reply?
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The State We’re in Water: Constructing a Sense of Place in the Hydrosphere
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Hidden Flows — photographers uncover the invisible flows in African cities
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NYC Urban Field Station—Who Takes Care of New York?
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Emilio Fantin—Dreams of Trees
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Katrine Claassens—Love Letters to the Muted World
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Typhoon Queens—The Multicultural Life of Clouds & Rain
FRIEC Collaborative Projects
Our work spans genres from poetry to comics, while also dancing often with folks in the sciences and governmental organizations.
SPROUT POETRY JOURNAL
ISSUE 4: CARE
This latest issue includes works that interrogate the modes of engaging with others in (urban and natural) space that can speak to the interrelated dimensions of care.
NBS COMICS: NATURE TO SAVE THE WORLD
26 Visions for Urban Equity, Inclusion and Opportunity
Now a global project with over ONE MILLION readers, we invite comic creators from all over the world to imagine comics about how people and nature might thrive together. Nature-based Solutions (NBS) Comics empowers creators to combine science and storytelling.
STORIES OF TNOC: VOLUME 2
Cheeky monkeys, vertical farms, climate change, and tree tribunals. Our latest collection features 49 short stories from 20 countries that radically re-imagine city life.
FRIEC Roundtables
A series involving artists and creative practitioners from around the world, exploring relationships with the elements of nature in cities.
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Artists and scientists that co-create regenerative projects in cities?
Yes, please. But how? -
Artists in Conversation with Water in Cities
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Artists in Conversation with Air in Cities
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Visions of resilience: Eighteen artists say or show something in response to the word “resilience”
Recent Essays
Essays from individuals of many disciplines, revealing the roots of ecological wellness in cities and cultures.
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To Live in Companionship with Trees, Plants, Rivers, and Mountains
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The Shape of Water, the Sight of Air, and Our Emergence from Covid
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We Had Forgotten That We Are Ecological Beings
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Who Takes Care of New York?
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Plastic Bag as Tumbleweed: Poetic Observations of the Everyday Around Us
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Ramsar COP 13: What can Artists Contribute to Urban Wetland Restoration?
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SALT: Restoration + Recreation = Water in California
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Socioecological Science is Failing Cities. The Humanities Can Help
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The Nature of Public Art: Connecting People to People and People to Nature
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Shifting the Paradigm: Art and Ecology Unite!
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Wall Watching in Iran
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Are We Truly Connected in Today’s High Frequency World?
Reviews & Reactions
Surveying diverse ecological arts practices in cities and cultures around the world.
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My Past, Present, and Future: A Review of Ecological Mediations
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Nature in Korea’s Capital: The Magic Stops at the Car Bridge
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Cloud Cities, Melting Cities: A Review of Yumiko Ono’s “Epitomes” at Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei
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French Landscape Painters and the Nature of Paris
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When a Korean Hillside Town Disappears, Who will Notice?
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Half-Earth Cities
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Patrick Geddes’ 19th Century “Pocket Park” Inspires Art Installation
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Drought and Flood: A Silicon Valley Museum Explores Water, Society, and City
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Finding Nature in the Walls of a Power Station
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Tim Ingold’s “Sustainability of Everything”
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Lessons from Beasts, Birds, and Other Inhabitants of the Urban Jungle
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Intertwining People, Nature, and Place with Quilts and Thread
LEAF Episodes
In each episode, three artists from the FRIEC collective share their work in a themed discussion.
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The LEAF: Episode 4. Show and Tells from Urban Arts Collective Members
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The LEAF Episode 3: Show and Tells from TNOC Urban Ecological Arts Collective Members
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The LEAF Episode 2: Show and Tells from FRIEC Collective Artists
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The LEAF Episode 1: Show and Tells from FRIEC Collective Artists
Opportunities
Nothing currently