Earth Celebrations’ ECOLOGICAL CITY: Art & Climate Solutions Project in New York City
ECOLOGICAL CITY – Art & Climate Solutions 2-1-2021-PRESS RELEASE-Earth Celebrations
Earth Celebrations’ pioneering community-based arts and cultural organizing strategies engage community participants to explore and take action on climate solutions and celebrate the importance of these local efforts to city and global climate challenges. Due to Covid-19, Ecological City 2021 has adapted the project with physically-distanced outdoor live and remote live-stream workshops and a culminating Ecological City – Art & Climate Solutions Pop-Up Pageant that cultivates vital social connection and creative collaborative action on local urban climate solutions.
Earth Celebrations’ artists-in-residence engage community participants through outdoor and live-stream workshops creating visual art, mobile sculptures, giant puppets, spectacular costumes and 20 site performances bringing together a cohesive vision of climate resiliency and ecological sustainability throughout the community gardens, neighborhood and East River Park waterfront. Artists explore sustainable art processes and bioremediation with natural living materials including seaweed and sprouted grass. They will grow mycelium (fungi) sculpture and leather from kombucha for construction of giant puppets and costumes illustrating inspiring grassroots climate solution initiatives throughout the Lower East Side.
Visual works created through the workshops are featured in the culminating ECOLOGICAL CITY: Pop-Up Pageant for Climate Solutions. The spectacular Pop-Up Pageant features physically-distanced live and remote live-streamed temporary visual art, mobile murals, giant puppets and costumed climate costumes festooning the neighbored from street corners and fire escapes to rooftops and gardens. Pop-Up Site Performances of dance, music, theater and poetry celebrate climate solution initiatives throughout the Lower East Side gardens, neighborhood and East River Park waterfront.
Artistic works explore these sites and the climate resilient and sustainable solutions that are designed and implemented throughout the neighborhood. The gardens provide a myriad of solutions including sequestering carbon, filtering air pollution and run-off, as well as absorbing flood water from storm surges and sea level rise. Visionary green infrastructure projects throughout the neighborhood include bio-swales, rain and pollinator gardens, solar gazebos, permeable pathways, vertical farming, green roofs and sustainable urban farming. On the waterfront, oyster planting, wetlands, kayak launch river access and a rolling hillside sea-wall berm offer varied resiliency approaches and solutions. The physically distanced pop-up pageant engages residents and over 50 partner groups to bring together and celebrate these inspiring grassroots generated local climate solutions and an urban sustainable ecosystem.
