Portfolio & Work

Watch Venezia Scalzo

SPOONFED is a screendance responding to the discovery that the average human brain contains a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastics. Through eco-absurdism and psychedelia, six dancers express the polluted body through vogue and contemporary dance, to mirror society’s paradoxical responses of ignorance, dissociation, helplessness, dismay, and resistance. The polluted body is a filmic archive that evidences today’s pollution, power, and complicity, at the precipice between ecological repair and unsalvageable plasticity.

SPOONFED takes on the metacognition of material substances, with our brains as the host, asking why we live in cognitive dissonance with pollutants, rather than embodied harmony with nature. These creative epistemologies are paradoxically both futile, and necessary, to drive climate healing. SPOONFED portrays the dual modern meanings of ‘neuroplasticity’ by satirically juxtaposing the uncomfortable tensions between corporate-political greed and artistic, scientific, and cultural complacency and resistance. This film is a critical investigation on why plastic pollution has escalated to this severity, with no end in sight.

Symbolism of Spoons

‘Single-use’ plastic spoons as bodily adornment makes our internal contamination visible as the physical consequences of industrial toxicity and systemic complicity. These materials critique systems of pollution, while revealing the slippage between consumption and embodiment. What is more absurd than plastic spoons on faces is the fact that no substantial research or healing is implemented to address the rapid accumulation of plastic in our brains and bodies. Life goes on with indifference, scientists and politicians lag decades behind the necessary research and policy to combat plastic distribution. On the surface, SPOONFED represents the “consumption” of plastics through food and consumerism. Taking on an even deeper meaning, this film addresses the “consumption” of drugs, art, and online content on health and justice as modes coping with the realities of pollution. Further, the present consequences of being ‘fed’ controlled narratives, and ‘fed up’ with the damage of monopolized pollutant systems, are made visible through choreographies of spoon-feeding.

The spoon is also a powerful symbol evoked by those with chronic illnesses to represent the different energetic limitations one faces due to pain and fatigue caused by disease. Activist resistance to medical neglect at the hands of plastic pollution stands within a long history of struggle for accessibility and care at large in the realm of health justice. The spoon’s potency as a metaphor is only added to by the sicknesses that micro-plastics create in bodies. It is ironic that science communication’s quippy spoon metaphor on plastic predominates discourse when impactful research on how to remove micro-plastics is still far off, having very real bio- and eco-logical consequences.

With the rapid increase of plastic accumulation, found more in our brains than any other organs, Terrence Mckenna’s point that “we do not have centuries of gently unfolding time” to halt mankind’s self- and planetary-destruction rings especially true.

Symbolism of the Torch

The figure in the white dress carries a torch and moves between the archetypal dualities of day and night, and of land and water. This figure carries the fire of resistance, purification, pre-plastic ritual memory, and future’s potential healing. The torch is symbol of hope and transformation. Her eternal flame makes visible the revolutionary surge of non-extractive embodiment and harmonious eco-relations pulsing within each of us.

The primordial symbol of a torch is placed on equal grounds with the contemporary plastic spoon by satirizing the artist-revolutionary. Artists have, as Mckenna says, largely failed to perform their societal role of “upholding a moral vision.” The torch represents the sheer futility of honest efforts to fight against the material consequences of greed and control. It represents the dissonance around these shortcomings and inabilities of not only artists, but also of scientists, politicians, and activists to slow the momentum of environmental destruction. For example, eco-corporatism and government infiltrations of social movements are power systems that seek to define the very meaning and value of humanitarian work, while simultaneously perpetuating and profiting from the oppression at hand. These monoliths render resistance ineffective, while minimizing and normalizing the root issues in the publics in a brainwashing ‘feedback’ loop of ‘spoonfed’ pollutants and narratives.

Political theorist Hannah Arendt understood freedom and action as one, and individual freedoms as modernly being governmental. SPOONFED prods at this ‘elephant in the room:’ the exploitation of activist bodies by governing bodies, with a 50% increase in brain plastics from 2016-2024, as an alarming example.

Audio: “Message to Artists“

Terence McKenna’s 1990 “Message to Artists” asserts the value of creativity as planetary intervention. His words ring timelessly true; Mckenna positions artists as required respondents to planetary crises. He says that artists must intervene where science, industry, and governance have failed to respond or research. Mckenna’s vision is for art to innovate at the cruxes between the sectors that cause and perpetuate climate pollution, through real-izing “the good, true, and beautiful.” He urges the importance of meeting the world of nature through psychedelic creativity to forge new healing pathways.

Thirty five years after he gave this speech, whole new worlds of meaning emerge looking back on his words from a time of unprecedented ‘neuroplasticity.’ SPOONFED’s glitchy crossroads place discourse directly on the absurd essentialist ultimatum between criminalized healing drugs and normalized toxic pollutants. The disregard and controversies surrounding these are productively revealing as societal mirrors on taboo bodily substances. The satirical nature of SPOONFED provokes an unsettling discomfort, scrying into contemporary lack of agency, and even awareness, regarding issues in our own bodies. Layers of deeply genuine sentiments, with the juxtaposition of cliches, exaggerations, and paradoxes, portray multi-sensory post-post-ironic critique of the infrastructural and environmental shortcomings of our civilization.

Location: NYC’s Wall Street

The six dancers pose around Wall Street’s famous Charging Bull statue, to emphasize the connection between economic growth and plastic waste. They ironically dance right outside of the Trump tower in NYC, wearing blue, yet not interacting with the building nor making the location filmically clear — reclaiming not only Trump’s land but also his control of narrative by treating his name and building as irrelevant. SPOONFED combats this administration’s propagandistic mis- and dis-information, that have furthered global bodily violence and pollution, by re-centering the grave realities of the scale of complicity and ineffectiveness of environmental regulations in the US. SPOONFED also touches on how Americans are too often naive to how US industrial wastefulness causes disproportionate damages in health and wellness for global populations.

Method: Screendance as Political Response

SPOONFED exhibits merely a small slice of the value of art as research. In particular, this film employs screendance as a method to make unprecedented global challenges visible and politically compelling. As a screendance, this work brings the primordial poetics of the body, like the flame, to meet the modern introspective and documentary capacities of film. In SPOONFED, screendance is used to track contamination, dis-ease, and the imaginative capacity of flesh and spirit to respond in eco-logical harmony. This film’s discursive merit comes from conveying a poignant, critical arc of emotional expressions that reckon with the complexities of living in environmental destruction, toward the goal of underscoring how cultural, intellectual, and policy responses to counteract bodily pollution are marginalized and discredited. Screendance here is a mode of critique that makes visible the embodied, lived realities of pollution’s invisible absurdities. These sorts of works can resonate and catalyze healing in individual, ecological, and institutional bodies — influencing both community practices and policy outcomes. Health is deeply tied to harmonious bodily relations with our environment; we co-create healing with one another, landscapes, and materials from plastics to psychedelics.

Elemental Embodiments: Character Symbolisms

The six dancers wear shades of blue and dance in ensemble. The color palette references that the human body is primarily composed of water, and signals alignment with aquatic ecosystems that are also heavily polluted by plastics. These bodies form a collective, fluid unit that mirrors and disrupts normative movements of “consumption” — just as their spoon adornment ruptures ignorance of the body’s plastic pollution.

While the dancers in blue are quintessentially exploring what it means to be aware of internal pollution in the present — the solo personages, in a white dress and yellow jumpsuit, represent the teetering futures between freedom from plastic, destruction at its hands, or something in between as nature adapts. This uncertainty is digitized via glitch aesthetics that mimic eco-delia: the transcendental, psychedelic-esque experience of emotionally and somatically meeting nature’s aliveness. These mythic personages convey transcendental emotions, as the states of consciousness of higher dimensions associated with psychedelics, art, and nature — healing modes becoming increasingly inaccessible thanks to plastic in our brains.

The figure in the yellow jumpsuit appears in natural spaces and performs with clear plastic utensils. She represents nature’s longstanding elemental cognizance of our pollutant crises outside of human epistemologies. She also represents how humanity must reckon with ancient ecological relations in a new light — and let nature’s coherence prophetically usher our transformation in the wake of crises. Confined to the pictorial through quick cuts, her fragmentation represents the limitations of ‘the new’ nature and humanity. Built from timeless archetypal myths that emerged from ancient eco-delic relations, alive within embodied knowledge, and altered by plastic’s ubiquity in biological systems, the clear plastic utensils sway in the breeze like plants in her hands.

Together, the watery and firey personages of SPOONFED show how dance is an elemental transmutation, that choreographically builds from mythic archetypes in the universal unconscious to address contemporary crises, as symbolized by the plastic spoon. This satirical investigation asks, will Mckenna’s “birth of a new kind of humanity” be one of embodying the transformative healing wildfire of the eternal flame? Or one of embodying plastic, that dwindles our conscious experience to cogs in our own, and the Earth’s, ecological collapse?