Andrea Haenggi
Artist
environmentalperformanceagency.com
Andrea Haenggi (she/her), Swiss-born, is breathing and working at this moment in Lenapehoking — now called Brooklyn, New York. Calling on plants as her guides, teachers, mentors and performers, her dance and ecosocial art/fieldwork practice creates a form of theater called Ethnochoreobotanography, which simultaneously explores issues regarding decolonization, ecology, feminism, power, labor and care.
She has performed and exhibited locally and internationally in theaters, galleries and on outdoor living land and received her latest research residences as an “embodied scientist” at the Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich, Switzerland (2019) and at Wave Hill, Bronx, NY (2020). She holds an MFA in Creative Practice from Transart Institute/Plymouth University UK and is a Swiss Canton Solothurn Dance Prize recipient. In 2017, seeking to expand her art-activist approach with spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds), she co-founded the art collective Environmental Performance Agency (EPA), whose primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms environment, performance, and agency.
The Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) is an artist collective founded in 2017 and named in response to the ongoing rollback of Federal environmental policy at the US Environmental Protection Agency. Appropriating the acronym EPA, the collective’s primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms environment, performance, and agency – using artistic, social, and embodied / kinesthetic practices to advocate for the agency of all living performers co-creating our environment, specifically through the lens of spontaneous urban plants, native or migrant. Current EPA Agents include Catherine Grau, an artist and Public Programs Coordinator at the Queens Museum, andrea haenggi, an artist/choreographer and faculty at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, Ellie Irons, an artist and PhD Candidate at RPI, Christopher Kennedy, an artist and Assistant Director at the Urban Systems Lab at the New School University, and spontaneous urban plants.