Opening Coven: Assuming the Ecosexual Position - Artists Imagining the Earth as Lover

Guests: Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens
Moderator: melanie bonajo

A Show & Tell with Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle

Beth and Annie will weave together stories, photos and video clips of their adventures in love, ecosex weddings, breast cancer and environmental activism. They will perform “25 Ways to Make Love to the Earth,” offer an “Ecosex Orientation,” then do Q & A.

In 2002 the two women artists fell heels-over-head in love and have collaborated non-stop ever since. In 2008 they invited the Earth to be their lover and launched the "ecosexual movement," and started new field of research, "sexecology.” They are committed to making environmentalism more sexy and fun, and to engaging a diverse group of outsider activists, theorists, artists, and sex community folks. They aim to create spaces for imagining other kinds of futures in the midst of global climate crisis.

Bio:

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle have been creating multi-media art projects about love, sex, and queerness together for 20 years. Annie was a sex worker from 1973 to 1995, and morphed into a feminist performance artist and sex educator. Beth was a sculptor and installation artist and became a University art professor. She’s taught at University of California Santa Cruz for 27 years.

These days the duo make environmental films through an ecosexual gaze, they produce symposiums, do theater and performance artivism. Their Ecosex Manifesto launched the Ecosex Movement. They are making a new film about fire for which they got a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. A new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position—the Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press) chronicles their epic love story and art/life adventures.

View their work at sprinklestephens.org

melanie bonajo (they/them). Through their films, performances, music and installations, they study subjects related to how technological advances and commodity-based pleasures increase feelings of alienation, removing a sense of belonging in an individual.

Captivated by concepts of the divine, Bonajo explores the spiritual emptiness of her generation, the erosion of intimacy, examines peoples’ shifting relationship with nature and tries to understand existential questions by reflecting on our domestic situation, ideas around classification, concepts of home, non-humans, technology, gender and attitudes towards value. They will represent The Netherlands at the Venice Biennale of 2022.