I see my artistic practice as a way to understand and sense something through my body; and engage creative intervention as a form of embodied knowledge making and learning. I draw mostly on performance-based work, with or without an audience.  Alongside my formal graduate research, my creative practices are informed by similar interests: human relationships with plants under occupation/colonialism; multi/extra sensory/dimensional conspiring with plants; and the entanglements of substances (i.e. compost, sweat, tears, pee, breath, etc.) that make us of and in each other.

My work at Luminous Bodies is framed around the following question: How would a consideration of plants as companion/co-conspirator species contribute to evolving notions of care?  The solution, I propose, to learning how to think, feel and experience plants as companion/co-conspirator species in communities of care, is through the body: the embodied nature of the experiencing self. The body itself is the true subject of experience, and the body alone enables us to enter into relations with other beings.  As a result, I see my work at Luminous Bodies emphasizing the need for embodied (performative) practice and experimentation in form, gesture and movement that will intentionally develop intimacy and care with the nonhuman.  Centering questions such as: how does something/someone come to matter and how to we attend to that someone or something that matters? Do I matter to the rock? Does it matter to me? And if so, how did we come to matter to each other? How do we tend to each other?Following through on those questions, I am curious how in a multispecies world, artistic interventions that stage encounters between humans and ecology open up new possibilities of thinking through and in care.

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Agnieszka Forfa hails from the salty shores of Soviet occupied Poland, and lives in Toronto, ON.  Currently a PhD student at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, with a focus on plant/human relationships; she is also a spiritual worker in training, and maintains a small private practice. She previously worked as a trauma therapist, as well as various social work positions such as street outreach, harm reduction, and facilitated an on-going disability justice centred group for queer and trans youth. She teaches at both Centennial College and York University. She sees her artistic practice as a way towards embodied knowing, gesture and interaction with place and relationship.