Reading the Field is an ongoing series that maps emergent currents in contemporary performance. This edition considers how artists are staging environmental ruin, extraction, and reworlding. From site-specific interventions to speculative fictions, these works unsettle spectatorship and invite audiences into embodied encounters with the climate crisis.
In the wake of accelerating climate collapse, artists are experimenting with new temporalities and forms of kinship. Some are staging grief and extinction. Others offer rituals of listening, repair, or ecological becoming. Many resist neat narratives or representations entirely, opting instead for duration, vibration, or ritual repetition. In doing so, they make space for experiences that are felt, not just seen.
This post gathers artists who work with place, ecology, and performance as a medium of planetary awareness. Their works do not illustrate the climate crisis. Instead, they move through its textures. They attune to the rhythms of tide, wind, oil, forest, sediment, or breath. Some offer speculative paths forward. Others stay with the collapse. All shift how we move through this moment.
Embodied Ecologies and Site-Specific Interventions
Emily Johnson and Kai Recollet – Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter
This cross-generational, site-responsive work explores Indigenous placekeeping, memory, and kinship through ceremony and performance. Created by Emily Johnson (Yup’ik) in collaboration with Anishinaabe youth leader Kai Recollet, the piece invites audiences into a long-form participatory experience that blends dance, language, light, and environmental listening. Rooted in land-based practices and guided by Indigenous epistemologies, each iteration responds to local Indigenous territories and the histories they carry.
More than a performance, Kinstillatory Mappings is a way of gathering. It is both ritual and rehearsal, a process of attuning bodies to the more-than-human world. Through movement, sound, and dialogue, the artists generate a space where ancestral knowledge meets contemporary urgency. Rather than staging a fixed work, Johnson and Recollet create an evolving encounter, responsive to place and community.
The performance foregrounds relationality between performers and audiences as well as between land, story, and time. In doing so, it challenges colonial frameworks of ownership and extraction, offering instead a practice of reciprocity. The work invites spectators to listen deeply with their whole bodies. Photo: ©Andrew Federman
Website
https://www.catalystdance.com
Works
Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing at Stars
Umyuangvigkaq
Videos
Citations
https://www.catalystdance.com/kinstillatory-mappings-in-light-and-dark-matter
Joan Jonas – Moving Off the Land
Joan Jonas’s Moving Off the Land explores the ocean as a poetic, political, and mythological space. Developed between 2016 and 2021, the performance combines video footage, text, drawings, and live action in installations set within museums and aquariums. The work is both an homage to the sea and a warning, engaging with themes of biodiversity, extinction, and interspecies connection. With text from writers such as Herman Melville and Sylvia Earle, Jonas invokes both the urgency and wonder of marine life.
The performance interweaves live drawing, layered sound, and video projections of underwater ecosystems, creating an immersive encounter with aquatic life. Jonas treats the ocean not as a setting but as a protagonist, complex, endangered, and mythic. In one sequence, she draws jellyfish in real time while swimming fish move across the screen, collapsing distinctions between science, story, and gesture.
Jonas’s work foregrounds the sensual and symbolic dimensions of ecological crisis. By placing herself in proximity to aquatic animals, she stages a kind of kinship that is intimate and unresolved. Moving Off the Land becomes a meditation on coexistence, asking what it means to listen to the ocean, not as metaphor, but as a voice. Photo ©Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land, 2016/2018. Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco, 2019. Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture/Justine Elephant.
Website
https://www.joanjonas.org
Works
Wind
Songdelay
Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll
Citations
“Joan Jonas.” Haus Der Kunst Munich, https://www.hausderkunst.de/en/eintauchen/joan-jonas. Accessed 6 June 2025.
Dominus, Susan, and Emiliano Granado. “Meet One of America’s Most Elusive Artists.” The New York Times, 1 Mar. 2024. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/t-magazine/joan-jonas-moma-retrospective.html.
Sarah Cameron Sunde – 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea
This global series by Sarah Cameron Sunde investigates the human relationship to water, sea-level rise, and time. In each iteration, Sunde stands in tidal waters for a full cycle, sometimes over 13 hours, offering her body as a temporal marker of ecological change. The project spans nine years and nine locations, including Bangladesh, Kenya, the Netherlands, and the U.S. It is as much a performance as a civic ritual, co-created with communities and documented through film.
36.5 makes visible the slow violence of climate change and invites viewers to witness, endure, and reflect in real time. Sunde’s body becomes a metronome for planetary shifts, offering a quiet yet powerful image of fragility and persistence. The performance emphasizes presence and patience, qualities often missing in contemporary discourse around ecological urgency.
Sunde’s durational form resists spectacle in favor of deep time. Each location brings its own political and environmental context, making the work a cartography of global water crises. By inviting local collaborators and framing the event as a public gathering, 36.5 enacts a collective ethics of attention. Photo: © Sarah Cameron Sunde
Website
https://www.sarahcameronsunde.com
Works
Atlanta to the Atlantic
Leaf on Water
PEAKS
Videos
Citations
Guggenheim Fellowships: Supporting Artists, Scholars, & Scientists. https://www.gf.org/fellows/sarah-sunde.
“Sarah Cameron Sunde.” HowlRound Theatre Commons, https://howlround.com/commons/sarah-cameron-sunde.
Lucia Monge – Plantón Móvil
Peruvian artist Lucia Monge has been organizing Plantón Móvil since 2010, a participatory performance where participants become a “walking forest,” carrying plants through urban areas to be planted in local parks. This ongoing work blurs the lines between procession, protest, and ecological ritual. Each iteration of Plantón Móvil adapts to its location (Lima, London, New York) connecting local flora, community memory, and political ecologies.
Through embodied procession and slow movement, the work offers a form of urban reforestation-as-performance, emphasizing care, collectivity, and visibility. Participants carry not only plants but the histories and futures of the spaces they pass through. The act of walking becomes a form of ecological storytelling, an invitation to move differently through the city.
Rather than abstractly symbolizing nature, Monge’s work directly contributes to replanting efforts, making the performance both metaphor and material intervention. The project challenges traditional separations between art, activism, and science, inviting new modes of participation. Plantón Móvil is an evolving forest of gesture, rooted in action. Photo: Plantón Móvil 2011, Lima ©Lucia Monge
Website
https://www.luciamonge.com
Works
Tools for Many Kinds of Selves,
Desbosque: desenterrando señales
Videos
Citations
https://www.luciamonge.com/planton-movil
ArtYard. “Lucia Monge Collaborates With Living Organisms for ‘While a Leaf Breathes (Mientras Una Hoja Respira).’” Hyperallergic, 8 Nov. 2023, http://hyperallergic.com/854640/lucia-monge-while-a-leaf-breathes-mientras-una-hoja-respira-artyard/.
Kennedy, Christopher & Irons, Ellie & Watts, Patricia. (2023). Ecological art in cities: exploring the potential for art to promote and advance nature-based solutions. 10.4337/9781800376762.00026. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372985619_Ecological_art_in_cities_exploring_the_potential_for_art_to_promote_and_advance_nature-based_solutions
Wilfred Ukpong – Blazing Century 1
Wilfred Ukpong is a French-Nigerian interdisciplinary artist whose work integrates performance, film, photography, and community engagement to address environmental degradation in the Niger Delta. In Blazing Century 1, Ukpong combines Afrofuturist narratives with site-specific performances, video, and images documentation to highlight the ecological and social impacts of oil extraction. The work is a speculative reclamation, imagining futures in the ruins of fossil capitalism.
Ukpong often stages his work in devastated landscapes. Costumes made from debris and soundscapes culled from industrial zones form the aesthetic grammar of resistance. Through movement, voice, and visual layering, Blazing Century embodies what Ukpong calls a “ritual of post-oil redemption.”
By involving local communities in his creative process, he fosters a collective reimagining of environmental justice and resilience. Ukpong’s work does not separate art from activism, nor speculation from site. It invites audiences to reckon with complicity and to dream with the land. Photo: ©Wilfred Ukpong
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcrAxt0Bh-U
“Mónica Alcázar-Duarte: Digital Clouds Don’t Carry Rain / Wilfred Ukpong: Niger-Delta/Future-Cosmos – e-Flux Agenda.” E-Flux, https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/591190/monica-alcazar-duartedigital-clouds-don-t-carry-rainwilfred-ukpongniger-delta-future-cosmos/. Accessed 6 June 2025.
Burlington Contemporary – Reviews. https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/reviews/reviews/wilfred-ukpong-niger-delta-future-cosmos. Accessed 6 June 2025.
In the face of climate catastrophe, these artists do not turn away. Instead, they craft performances that root us in presence, demand accountability, and conjure alternative relationships with the earth and each other. Their practices are not separate from the environments they engage, they emerge from them, shaped by tidal rhythms, degraded soils, ancestral territories, and speculative futures. Performance here becomes both a sensor and a sanctuary, revealing how the live body can register what satellites and studies cannot.
These choreographies of collapse are not neat acts of awareness-raising. They are messier, slower, and more attuned to the lived textures of environmental crisis. Whether through standing in rising seas, walking forests through cities, or summoning mythologies of marine extinction, these works ask us to move differently, through our cities, through our grief, through the ruins of extraction. They remind us that witnessing is not passive. It is a political and sensory act.
As the climate crisis accelerates, these artists don’t offer answers; they offer orientations. They rehearse how to stay with the trouble, to reimagine kinship, to embody duration. In doing so, they transform performance from spectacle to practice: a practice of attention, of interdependence, of radical care.
