Soil and Spirit: Animating the Intersections of Disabled knowledges and Endangered Forests.
Soil and Spirit: Animating the Intersections of Disabled knowledges and Endangered Forests An interactive session with artist Marina Heron Tsaplina. Co-sponsored by the Disability Cultural Initiative, Disability Studies, Core Pathways in Climate Change, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Department of Theater and Performance Studies, and the Davis Center for Performing Arts.
During this interactive event, artist and activist Marina Heron (Tsaplina) will invite us to engage with and learn about her current project, Soil and Spirit. Drawing on anti-colonial practice, disability-informed artistry and crip wisdom, Marina’s work taps into ecological attunement to help people from diverse lineages deepen their capacity to listen to and reconnect with place, to recognize the animacy, spiritual liveness and histories of the land, and to hone new capacities for attentiveness and embodied perception.
If you can, please bring a handful of soil with you to this engagement. It can be from anywhere: near your home, on your path towards Georgetown, or from a local place of meaning.
Marina Heron (Tsaplina) (she/her) is a Russian-born, Lenapehoking (NYC) based disabled artist who forms participatory poetic enchantments through puppetry performance and site-specific installations. She co-founded and was the Lead Artist of Remagine Medicine at Duke University, a Kienle Scholar in the Medical Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine, and the Strategy and Action Lead of New York #insulin4all. Her work in bringing disability artistry into medical education and the medical empire will be published in Artists Remaking Medicine (2023). Dream Puppet (2021), a large-scale installation created for an endangered ancient forest in the Yaak Valley, MT, was commissioned by Orion Magazine for the cover of its special issue on disability justice. Marina has just finished a Visiting Artist residency in the Sheafer Theater at Duke University, where she led a 1-year artistic research project for her latest work, Soil and Spirit.
This hybrid event is wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreted, and Zoom captioned. Please contact Libbie Rifkin at lsr@georgetown.edu for any accessibility requests.