Saturday May 22 * 6pm * outside at Rhizome * RSVP
How do supposedly ‘green’ products--consumer products marketed as environmentally friendly--in fact cover over the scope and scale of the environmental catastrophe we’re in? How do we expose this greenwashing, and explore alternative ways of engaging this crisis? Jennifer Natalya Fink and Julie Laffin will address these questions in a large-scale site-specific performance-installation at Rhizome.
We are at a critical moment in the anthropocene. If we do not end our rapidly accelerating environmental destruction, humankind will not survive. Greenwashing, instead of making us confront the crisis, encourages us to consume even more. The scale of these crises demands an equally dramatic and monumental intervention.
We will develop a large-scale installation performance using a 100-foot green dress. The performance will involve a covering and uncovering, a literalization of the greenwashing as the green material of the dress first creates a gorgeous illusion of green environmental harmony and then leaves a residue, a nontoxic trace for the audience to contemplate. The racist history of burying toxic materials in African American/BIPOC/economically disadvantaged communities will be materialized, literalized, performed as we broadcast this history from microphones inside the dress. Using Rhizome’s yard and building, we will create a visual spectacle engaging these issues in a fashion that is safe for viewers but unsettling to their sense of ‘green’ consumption. The community will be encouraged to participate in the performance by circling the green-dressed spectacle and on cue shouting out their own greenwashing practices.
About the artists:
For thirty years, Fink and Laffin have loved each other’s work. For the past ten years, they have each faced crises of disability. Out of these intersecting personal experiences and political concerns emerged an ongoing collaboration of installation performances at environmentally compromised locations including Superfund sites in African-American Midwestern parks and mold-infested U.S. university plumbing.
Fink long admired Laffin’s monumental “Red Dress” series of feminist interventions for their scale, audacity, and glorious embrace of the epic and awful dimensions of normative white femininity. Laffin admired Fink’s sardonic, embodied texts for their lucid cultural critique and delirious erotics. Both Fink and Laffin faced disability-related life crises, which led each to a larger critical vision of the environmental crisis disabling our planet. Joining creative forces, in 2017 they began a series of installation performances, the “Toxic Tango” series, that reveal hidden contaminants in site-specific, visceral, and embodied ways. In 2020, they launched “Underbelly,” extending this practice to an exploration of the racism of the feminist movement in which they are both so invested. In “Going Green,” they hope to extend the scope of this collaborative practice both in its scale, politics, and aesthetics. By working with the notion of greenwashing on a visual, conceptual, and formal level, we will explore how bodies and materials can transform and intervene in the story an institution itself about how ‘green’ it is. We are also expanding our political practice, explore the intersections of environmental degradation with structural racism.