“EARTHWRITING”
Community Eco-Art Zine (Link Here for online version; Print version forthcoming)
A Statement from the Editor:
UC Berkeley geographer Sharad Chari conceptualizes ‘earth-writing’ as a form of imagining spaciousness: a way of connecting trans-spatial, subaltern calls for a more spacious world. It could be argued that environmental humanities scholar Clara Wilch imagines a kindred ‘spaciousness’ through the ways the arts can illuminate interventions in the mediation of public space, transforming our understanding of infrastructure into something more imaginative, creative, and ecologically-responsive, particularly in response to extractive racial capitalism and climate change.
Taking these scholars’ ideas as starting points, we released an Open Call to hear musings on the role of public art (and artists) in our shared response to global and embodied climate change.
What does it mean to make something while the ground is shifting beneath your feet?
What sort of shared space do you dream of?
What are ways that public art and infrastructure can knit our present reality with our futures?
The wide range of submissions we received reflects the inherent porosity of the provocation. In this zine, you will find performance scripts, poetry, essays, photographs, and more. More map than book, as you move through this zine, we hope you find spaciousness of thought, hope, and imagination. As we move into the opacity of the future, we open this zine as the beginning of a long process of reimagining what truly site-specific art can do and be.
-Magdalena Poost, January 2025
Graphic Design by Chen Luo.
Zine Contributors:
Alula Hunsen is a writer and editor working with the Boston Ujima Project on publishing toward liberatory urban futures. His specific intrigues lie in Black cultural production and structures that support self-determination; he’s excited to explore participatory modes of narrative work.
Ananth Udupa (he/they) is a dancer, designer, and artist based in Boston, MA. With a background in Bharatanatyam and architecture, his work aims to nurture diasporic communities through socially engaged art.
Chenoa Baker (she/her) is a curator, writer, professor, and descendant of self-emancipators—all under the umbrella of a self-crafted job title, community art synergist. After working on exhibitions at ICA/Boston, PEM and MFA/Boston, Baker started a full-service curatorial firm, and received a WBUR Maker Award, which featured her on NPR’s All Things Considered, in 2024.
Chen Luo (she/her) is a graphic designer and lecturer based in Boston and Maryland, She teaches graphic design, book arts, and typography. Chen runs Body&Forma—a collective design house focused on bridging language barriers through publishing and performative workshops. Her work has been recognized and exhibited in Canada, Italy, Japan, China, Korea, and the United States.
Dylan Havok uses art and poetry to process their connections to the world around them using themes of death, growth, stillness, and uncertainty. You can follow their art journey on instagram at @plutos_armoire.
Jaina Cipriano is an experiential designer, filmmaker, and photographer whose work explores themes of religious and romantic entrapment through handcrafted, immersive worlds. Her award-winning films and photography evoke emotional healing by transforming personal narratives into spaces for connection, catharsis, and play.
Kate Schassler lives in Jamaica Plain, Boston and likes to bike really fast. At her day job, Kate works on stormwater, floodwater, and maps.
Magdalena Poost is the Public Art & Ecology Fellow at the Rose Kennedy Greenway, through Princeton’s High Meadow Environmental Fellowship program. A social ecologist and clown, they are interested in the study of shared & public space as a site of material memory, public narrative, climate change, and potential queer futures.
Milica Denković finished her MA in New Media Arts at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad (Serbia). In 2021/2022, her video poetry work was officially selected for 25 film and video festivals. Besides intermedia art and video poetry, she is also active as a slam poetess.
Yolanda He Yang (she/her) is an installation and performance artist. Her work employs the sentimental power of subtlety and ephemerality, often exploring light, dirt, entrances, paths, surfaces, public spaces, or, in one word – metaphors.
The Greenway is situated on the unceded and ancestral homelands and waterways of the Massachusett and Pawtucket Tribes, and their neighbors the Wampanoag, and Nipmuc Peoples, who have stewarded this land for hundreds of generations.
As a land-based organization, we recognize that the land and waterways are older than we are and pay honor and respect to this history and to this land, these communities, their Elders and all past, present, and future generations.
Thank You to Our Supporters!
Public Art on The Greenway is made possible with major support from the Barr Foundation, Goulston & Storrs, the Greenway Business Improvement District, the Mabel Louise Riley Foundation, Meet Boston, the Wagner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Richard K. Lubin Family Foundation.
Additional support is provided by the Deborah Munroe Noonan Memorial Fund, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee.