Soils Turn Speaker Series
Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens
Thursday, January 23
United States: 9am HST, 11am PST, Noon MST, 1pm CDT, 2pm EST
Europe: 19:00 GMT Australia: Friday January 24, 6am AEDT
For the first of five online events for the Soils Turn Speaker Series, presenting the work of artists focused on addressing soils as art, multi-media collaborators Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens will discuss their soil related works including Dirt Bed (2012) performed at Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, New York, and again at Emmetrop, Bourges, France, which turned into a Louis XIV soil bed ecosex show. Also, their work Wedding to the Soil (2014), which included a spoken-word piece called "Dirt" performed at the multimedia arts festival Donaufest in Krems, Austria. In the Dirt (2018), in which the artists "played around" in 18 tons of soil that filled the Vortex Theatre in Austin, Texas will also be discussed. That same year an interview with the artists' in Field to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene by co-editor Alexandra Toland was published. Join us for a presentation of eco-sexual works that shift the concept of Earth as mother, to Earth as lover.
Speakers
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle have created multi-media art projects about love, sex, and queer ecologies together since 2002. Annie was a sex worker from 1973 to 1995 and morphed into a feminist performance artist and sex educator. In 1994, Beth became a professor of sculpture and intermedia at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she still teaches and directs the E.A.R.T.H. Lab. These days the duo make environmental films with an ecosexual gaze; they also create theater, performance art, eco-activism, and produce symposiums and workshops. Their Wedding to the Earth and the Ecosex Manifesto launched the Ecosex Movement in 2008. Notably, they were official documenta 14 artists, received a 2019 Eureka Fellowship, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Their new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position—the Earth as Lover, available at the University of Minnesota Press, chronicles their epic love story and art/life adventures. sprinklestephens.org
This event is free for members + one guest. $5 for non-members. All participants MUST REGISTER.
