Andrea’s Field Notes
Urban Weeds As Agency -> A Dance
Andrea Haenggi has a research-based creative practice she calls Ethnochoreobotanography that employs her roles as a Choreographer, Interdiciplinary Artist, Dancer, Embodied Scientist, Fieldwork Movement Specialist, Somatic Movement Educator and an EPA agent. Her sensual-bodily-tough works confront audiences with a world beyond humans.
My choreographic practice reveals sensorial, bodily and affective experiences, questions and thoughts are developed through the engagement with the spontaneous urban plants, which are often called weeds. The choreographic practice shoots out to explore themes of co-evolution, immigration, cultivation, feminism, vegetal philosophies, decolonizing nature and sexuality. The radicle goes into the cracks, looking at value, maintaining, healing, labor and care.
Urban Weeds Garden (1067 Pacific Street, an Urban Lot in Brooklyn, NYC) – 2017
As an Embodied Scientist and Fieldwork Movement Specialist Andrea Haenggi explores Urban Ecologies in Transition. The plant-body encounters with spontaneous urban plants in spaces like “vacant lots’, sidewalk cracks, treepits and highway medians are documented through movement language and visual documentation. They are shared with other humans and non-humans as part of the process and allows for to experience and understand shifting ecologies, and to highlight under recognized histories and stories.
I believe they are more than only humans in the world.
I insist that humans and nonhumans of any culture, race and gender has the rights to have a place, to be opportunist and to act with no fear. This totality is what I call resilience. I insist that gestures and movement is thought.
photo 1 and 2 by photographer Julie Lemberger
