moira williams

I have a constellation of invisible disabilities that I was born with and those that I acquired from a car accident and environmental pollution. I often think of my constellation of disabilities as ancestral legacies because of my relational connection with the land, the legacies of disability in my biological family and the deliberate disabling of Indigenous people and our lands.

Carrying Breathes Between Ancestors installation includes an experimental looped video featuring the New York Pine Barrens and Wetlands, which are an integral ecologies regularly dismissed and destroyed due to consumption and systemic and aesthetic beliefs that these lands are barren rather than ecological diverse sacred, and vital to all life.

The work weaves together the Pine Barrens and Wetlands through the shared lens of disability; in the ways that the Pine Barrens, Wetlands, and disabled bodies, are considered disposable, aesthetically flawed, and as a waste of resources. While at the same time, Carrying Breathes Between Ancestors celebrates relational cycles of pain through vulnerability, reciprocity and decay as vital ecologies of expression and abundance. The work offers my multi-layered approach to embodying and attempting to ease my own ancestral, emotional and body pain through ritualized hand dancing over ancestral water ways, land and myself. My gestures, the sounds, overlapping imagery and textures of bodies of land/water, food and medicines are woven together and projected on a screen woven with grasses from the wetlands and stained with berries. Each art work invites touch and is co-created with plant medicine and animals living with these lands.

A multi-platform work with Lenapehoking, where I use my disabled Indigenous body, specifically my armpits to germinate a native vetch. Armpits are a vulnerable part of the body that is often invisible and full of sensitive lymph nodes. The work sets my body and all bodies in the work as a vulnerable and reciprocal landscape and at the same time, as a metaphor of colonial extraction and the contaminated earth left behind by extractive practices. Vetch can be used for Phytoremediation, a technology recognized in the early 16th century. Phytoremediation works with living plants along with their associated microorganisms that can amend soil and water. The native vetch and its microorganisms, systemically take in arsenic and light metal contaminants through its roots.

Tiny plots were tested then Phytoremediated with the sprouted vetch from my armpits. The sprouts were then transferred to the Dirt Shirt, and when large enough, planted in the tiny arsenic contaminated plots. I wore the Dirt Shirt on daily activities throughout the spring and summer. The Dirt Shirt is constructed with a watering system and a mirror for checking in with the growing vetch. Once the soil was cleared of the contaminants, I grew Buckwheat, harvested and ground it to make flour. Bread was made with the Buckwheat flour following Phytoremediation with my neighbors at The American Indian Community House and we ate it together. Following our harvest, we seeded the plots with ironweed and goldenrod.

The work or ecology, considers the use and labor of plants removing contaminants that in turn often become contaminants themselves and what our responsibility is to them. The work also speaks to mono crops planted in large swaths like wheat, that have cleared, poisoned, and removed the lands of Native peoples, our cultures, and eco systems along with a multitude of micro to macro beings essential for soil health and in turn all beings’ health.

For more info about Phytoremediation check out A Citizen's Guide to Phytoremediation by the EPA HERE

is ongoing participatory Eco Soma work centering disability while weaving “access intimacy”* together with water intimacy. Many disabled people move and experience the ecological world along the edges like parking lots in parks and by beaches. Invoking Aqueous Eco Monster Ancestors embraces these edges and further invites our experiences.

The first image is a video excerpt with Petra Kuppers, Petra is a white woman with a almost shaved head wearing large, translucent yellow glasses and black top with a cream collar. Petra is pictured from the shoulders up with her hands lifted and her head tilted slightly back. She sits in front of a white stream of sea foam and dark green algae and seaweeds. Thank you Petra!

The second image is a Zoom screen shot of 9 squares filled with human silhouettes that are in turn, filled with or surrounded by textured filled images of seaweeds, eels grasses, sponges, sand and sea foam.

The third image is one Zoom block with moira’s face floats in the middle of a bed of light and dark green algae and seaweeds. moira’s face in light bronze colored and pictured from nose to chin . their hands are raised palms up and so close to the screen that they look enormous.

The fourth image is an excerpt of the Invoking Aqueous Eco Monster Ancestors score. The letters are black on a white background. The strings of letters are sometimes spaced apart, short strings of letters and sometimes long strings of letters.

*“access intimacy” a phrase by disability scholar and activist Mia Mingus, expressing access ecologies; “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs.

“Plants and animals, including humans, are not autonomous individuals but are holobionts: biomolecular networks that consist of visible hosts plus millions of invisible microbes, recent microbiological research has shown."
From the Abstract, “Will the Pronoun I Become Obsolete: A Biological Perspective”

Not everything that counts can be counted: Microbes for the game board are collected from Atlantic City. Wild yeast for the die is collected from positive living communities across the country. Players activate the game by "rolling the dice,” by adding wild yeast to vegetable agar filled Petrie dishes via a pipette. Wild yeasts are from: Highlander School, Faerie Sanctuary IDA and The Farm. Kombucha and kombucha scobies, sourdough and ginger beer are nurtured from the same wild yeasts. Scobies are exchanged one-to-one for additional microbes through worldwide scobie trades. These microbial communities are then nurtured, shared and combined to grow scobie dollars that are printed with fermented indigo. The worldwide scobie exchanges are also nurtured into larger scobies or biofilms, that are used to create a living “skin” for covering a to scale monopoly house. Traded scobies rest in a scobie hotel until traded or nurtured into microbial drinks. Ginger beer, sourdoughs, kombucha and scobies are shared as the game is played and traded with participants in exchange for creating Community and Chance Cards and/or game pieces. Community and Chance Cards invite participants to hold hands, inhale deeply, clap, open specimen jars and pass the scobie dollars to one another to further activate microbial exchanges, connect with one another, share and move together.

The wild yeasts present throughout the game represent living communities and reciprocity. We are meant to nurture, share and regenerate the wild yeasts as an active meditation on our responsibility and interdependence between one another, our health and the health of our environment. Elizabeth Magie’s 1904 Landlord’s Game created during the Works Progress Era over potluck dinners with her friends is our guide.

Contributors:

Michael Asbill

Conrad Bourdeau

Niki Athanasiadou

Alejandro Caballero-Mancillas

Timothy Gerken

Wendy Tigchelaar

Chloé Langlais

Alicia Wilson

Morage Rose 

Jan Mun

Gil Lopez

Heather Kapplow

Catriona de Guzman

Jill Sigman

Suran Song

Lucena Mustafa

William Burns

Paige Breaux

Roberta Sutton

Aliya Abboud

Brigitte Kovacs

Suran Song

Malik Jordon

Sarah Weitlauf 

Jada Santiago

Lichen Lovers.org

Deirdre Heddon

Mary Jeys

Gregory Bruno

DD Maucher

Aisha Brown

Alison Irvine

Nanacy Nowacek

Alexander Campos

Rachel Carrigan

is an eco somatic choreographed night walk centering disability, where we walk, roll and/or wobble in the night under a full moon, during the day.

My hat is an invitation, whispering, “here I am, come and join me under the full moon.” I also use it as a video screen along our choreographed night walk during the day. But the hat’s primary function is to signal to every person joining me on the night walk, that my hat’s width is the necessary width needed to make walkways accessible for people who use a wheelchair. All the paths we are taking during our moonlight walk are accessible.

Thanks to Jeremiah Barber and Cate Hewitt for documentation photo stills. Thanks to Frank DiNardi for drone video of accessible multi-species pathways.

Subcultures co~created with a multitude of adaptive bodies. The Living and Dying and Living Archive is a comingling of bodies between a 10 year old Kombucha biofilm and its symbiotic life and my own. Eros of Contact Folded is a performance with the Kombucha and projected via a live feed projection. During the performance I submerge body parts, push, pull, hold and fold the Kombucha. Artifacts found in the Kombucha liquid are then removed, added to media in a petri dish as a way to co~create with multiple species, making visible multiple bodies and multiple ways of doing/being together and/or generative comininglings. These cominglings often spark sensorial connections. Sensorial connections oppose capitalism as they create slippery, messy blurs and frictions between and against categories and hard data. An autonomous wayfinding, underlying connections between disability, the land and ways to disrupt ecological hard data collecting. Hard data is just that; rigid, based in surveillance, linear and typically collected and used as vehicles for oppression. It is not sensorial or celebratory as soft data can be. Soft date is about autonomy, being fluid, shedding, cycles, being a trickster, intimacy, those edges and moments.

is a multi-platform work about vernal pools; an often overlooked body of water and notions surrounding restoration/cure, hydro colonization and disability. Performance excerpt. Choreographed to field recordings of my everyday being with a small vernal pool in an industrial park. The vernal pool, treated as a puddle, is also treated sociopolitically and aesthetically as something needing a remedy, a cure, a method to control its cycles of overflows, gurgles and seepings. I used Hydro microphones to record the pool's inner sounds. Then, I used the same hydro microphones to record my own inner sounds while I sat with the vernal pool as an act of bearing witness to its desired and prescribed cycles of disruptions, overflows, “messines”, coverings and eruptions. The city street repair agencies continued to attempt to remedy the pool’s “messiness” with a mixture of cow manure and tar. Flag signals and body movements are based on the embodied language of the puddle's residents and visitors. Choreography, sound, objects are co-created with the vernal pool.

The work is on-going and will become a graphic novel weaving together “access intimacy”*, ecological intimacy and water intimacy with vernal pools.

Vernal pools and vernal ponds or ephemeral pools, are temporary, seasonal pools of water that provide habitat for distinctive plants and animals. Each pool is covered by shallow water for variable periods of time from winter to spring; but may be completely dry for most of the summer and fall.

*“access intimacy” coined by disability scholar and activist Mia Mingus. The phrase emphasis the cultural activism disabled people and communities co-create through their lived experiences towards collective access making.

https://soundcloud.com/moira-williams-923399413/35-days-being-puddle

Part of Multi~Laterals by x at Mark Morris, Dance Center NYC

Socrates' Wagon Sings with Demeter's Torch (2014-15) is part of, FLEX IT! My Body. My Temple., Centennial National Park and the Parthenon Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. Demeter's Torch is a mobile community adobe oven sheltered by a mini Parthenon. Both are community built. Athena envelopes hold wild yeast collected in the Athena Room inside the Parthenon Museum extending her diplomacy, wisdom and guardianship to our health. Socrates' Wagon is a wagon used to collect wild yeast during regular public philosopher’s walks in Centennial National Park. Both wild yeasts are public invitations for stepping away from conventional mass-produced baked goods. Philosopher’s walks are a place for contemplative walks, for meditating on visible and invisible communities, with an eye to inclusive conversations with and led by local health care workers, care givers, people with autoimmune illnesses and holistic dietitians while collecting wild yeast. Demeter's Torch, the mobile adobe oven, is a public oven for cooking, community eating and experimenting with the sourdough made from wild yeasts collected in Athena's Room and during philosopher's walks in Centennial National Park. A doctor’s cabinet inside the Parthenon Museum, holds wild yeast and sour dough starter for people to “feed", use for baking in the mobile community oven and/or take and share. The doctor’s cabinet and yeast makes visible that care and responsibility are interconnected actions, necessary for moving to holistic practices for equality, our environment and one another. As a whole, Socrates’ Wagon Sings with Demeter’s Torch is about communities and in conversation with food policies like the Food Freedom Act, standardized food systems, our relationship to food and the direct ties between the environment’s health  and our own health.

Socrates' Wagon Sings with Demeter's Torch was built with many hands, moved around and heated up by 23 local chefs, 45 families and Casa Azafran, an International Open Kitchen Collective.  Many Thanks to everyone at Parthenon Museum, Centennial National Park and Arts Center, Vanderbilt University, The Center for Medicine Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, Scarritt Bennett Center, Fort Houston, Ferrin Ironworks, SEED Space, Windy Farms and Casa Azafran!

http://www.eatwild.com/products/tennessee.html

https://www.tn.gov/agriculture/topic/ag-farms-organics

https://attra.ncat.org/sorg/tn/

The following images are part of a call and response campaign I initiate and continued on Instagram during the 2019 New York City mayoral race about accessible NYC waterways, ferries, evacuation planning as a way to invite NYC’s disability communities into the conversation about the NYC Comprehensive Water Plan 2020.

New York City Planning Department (NYCPD) and Works On Water commissioned the work.

The images are of each mayoral candidate (not all are pictured here), wearing a sash that says: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice to Meet at the Water?” The questions and phrases are based on conversations with the NYCDP, the making of the NYC Comprehensive Water Plan 2020, with disabled communities across disability and NYC, my lived experiences as a disabled person trying to physically and cognitively access NYC waterfronts and waterways, and from researching public maps and their access points along the NYC waterways.

Contributor: Zoey Hart

My “hat” is made of bleached newspapers from Bogota, Colombia, a megaphone sits in the “hat’s” top center. A handheld cassette player emanates recordings up and out the megaphone. The recordings are of Alejandro David Osorio Pérez, who mentored me in empathetic beekeeping. I used audio to document each of our 182 work days together. Words begin to disappear in the final tapes. Osorio’s voice triggers the beekeeping gestures as communication that we co-created together and with the bees, during my apprenticeship. The work is about a foundation of relatedness, a way of being with and for one another.

Osorio cannot speak English, and I cannot speak Spanish or any other languages including "proper" pronunciations of English words, due to my brain injury. The newspapers that make the hat are pages I slept on by night and wore in my shoes by day. Since we were communicating through our bodies, I hoped for Spanish words to enter my dreams, travel into my head, allowing me to speak with Osorio "fully". Never learning how to speak Spanish, I erased the print from the newspapers and practiced our co-created beekeeping gestures in the Plaza de Bolívar each evening.

The performance documentaion here is at Studio 10 in NY. It is a remembering of the bees, Orsio's and my ways of communicating with one another. The gestures are triggered by Orsio's recorded voice/instructions, my memories which I recorded for the 182 days Orsio mentored me in empathetic beekeeping. The recordings and performance reflect the ways we worked together and the gestures that we worked out together. Our working together also includes our ways and communications with the bees. The work has also been hosted by Hector Canonge's INTERNET ,“Race and Corporal Embodiments,” Queens Museum Media Lab, NY.

We are always acting in a social field with our words or gestures.

Words may be embodied, put into service through a body in social action, and gestures may be the actual body. It is the relatedness that is important.

The environment is in us, and we are fully in the environment. Breathing is often symbolic of life itself. We take special note of words that are carried on final breaths, and sometimes we even cherish the physical substance of the breaths themselves.  

https://soundcloud.com/moira-williams-923399413/word-servant-2014

I inhaled and exhaled repeatedly into organic latex balloons, then pickled them. My breathing moved from an unconscious state to conscious exchange, cycling through and with multiple molecular bodies, and environments entangling all these bodies with my own in fermentative expressions of preservation and decay.

Performance and cardboard stand-in. Materials, fermented walnut milk, willow bark, wild rice flour and linen gauze, surgical bucket and disposable cameras. Fermenting, peeling, polishing, sorting, cleaning, cleansing, sifting, straining, de-husking, washing, and distillation are different technologies used in many cultures for palliative care. Similar preparations are used in the pharmaceutical industries and have been used since time immemorial in Indigenous cultures from around the world. The disposable cameras on my body invite participation. The repetitive and slow wrapping and unwrapping in the fermented mixture in the wandering performance becomes an interactive ritual and co-witnessing . The mixture spills, leaks and splatters sometimes pooling close by, moving across the floor and splashing the walls.