andrea haenggi

Community Fellow

A photo f andrea wearing a blue long sleeve collared shirt and sunglasses immersed in greenery.

andrea haenggi (she/they) has a research-based ‘ethnochoreobotanic’ art practice - meaning that she co-creates movement with land, plant life with their inherent intelligence, and more-than-human kin, all oriented toward creating multispecies communities in the present. This art practice employs her roles as an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, dancer, embodied scientist, land defender, and EPA (Environmental Performance Agency) agent. 

Born as an identical twin in a Swiss farming village, she has lived half of her life on the land of Lenapehoking/Brooklyn. Since 2015 urban plants have been her guides, teachers, mentors, and performers; she uses notions from queer ecology -- with its politics of desire and speculative world-building. Her work responds to decolonization, climate change, feminism, and care. Her solo and collaborative EPA projects have been part of many recent environmental art and activism exhibitions, including The Department of Human and Natural Services at NURTUREArt, Ecological Consciousness: Artist as Instigator at Wave Hill, and the Works on Water Triennial at Governors Island. Her latest work Speed Dating your EX (2022), a participatory performance installation with the nearly–extinct plant Apium repens, premiered at the Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich (CH). 

She holds an MFA in Creative Practice from Transart Institute/Plymouth University UK and is a Swiss Canton Solothurn Dance Prize recipient. She is on the faculty at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (NYC) and The New School/College of Performing Arts where she teaches Improvisation & Collaboration and Socially Engaged Artistry.

Website: weedychoreography.com and environmentalperformanceagency.com 

Project Description

To be with the shore is all we ask is an ongoing eco-socially-engaged performance/art installation project. The project is developed in collaboration with the Estuarial Council of the Weeds (the community of local spontaneous terrestrial and aquatic plant experts) and the humans who are listening to the shore of the vulnerable coastal city of Lenapehoking land, New York City. The project's central question is: What if the "language of the coastal shore" is part of the "governance" decision-making process as we build diverse and equitable multispecies communities? 

For 2023 we seek to expand participation into the virtual community to allow voices of diverse sensibilities to engage with the NYC shoreline and be heard. We seek to create an interactive web platform that will feature participatory methods for embodied attunement with the shore. Bladderwrack, a seaweed, will be one of the principal guides. 

The goal is for the interactive web platform to be launched at the NYU gallery opening and co-presented with a participatory artwork. Through a performance procession, bladderwrack will come into the gallery. Visitors will be encouraged to follow one of the web-score instructions, which involves taking one bladderwrack with them and bringing it back to the shore.