Spoonfed – Written Statement

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, in the precipice between ecological repair and unsalvageable plasticity.

SPOONFED portrays 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 psychedelic art and nature. These creative epistemologies are paradoxically both futile, and necessary, to drive climate healing, as SPOONFED portrays by satirically juxtaposing the uncomfortable tensions between corporate-political greed and artistic, scientific, and cultural complacency to offer a critical view 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 — the bodily consequences of industrial toxicity and systemic complicity. These materials not only critique systems of pollution but reveal the slippage between consumption and embodiment. What is more absurd than plastic spoons on faces — is the fact that no substantial research or healing implementation has been put forth to address the rapid accumulation of plastic in our brains and bodies. Life goes on with indifference, scientists and politicians are decades behind where we need to be in terms of minimizing pollutants. In SPOONFED, the spoon takes on an even deeper meaning, representing “consumption” of both plastics through food and consumerism, alongside satirizing the “consumption” of drugs, art, and online content.

The spoon is also a powerful symbol evoked by those with chronic illnesses to represent the different energy limitations one faces due to the limitations of diseases. Activist resistance to medical neglect at the hands of plastic pollution stands within a long history of struggle for accessibility and care regarding health justice at large. The spoon’s seriousness as a metaphor is only added to by the sicknesses microplastics create in the body. Pointing at the absurdism of science communication’s quippy metaphor on plastic, when real research on how to remove micro-plastics is far from implemented, having very real consequences. With the rapid increase of plastic accumulation, found more in our brains than any other organs, 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 elemental landscapes of day and night, and of land and water. This figure carries the fire of resistance, of purification, and of pre-plastic ritual memory, and potential future. 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 torch as a primordial symbol is placed on equal grounds with the contemporary 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 failures of not only artists, but also of scientists, politicians, and activists to create meaningful positive impact. Power systems define the very meaning and value of humanitarian work, thus discrediting resistance as ineffective, when in reality these same powers are complicit and profiting from the oppression at hand.

Hannah Arendt’s paradigms of freedom and action as one, and individual freedoms as modernly being governmental, come into play here as SPOONFED prods at this ‘elephant in the room’ of the collective rapid spiral toward destruction; the exploitation of activist bodies by governing bodies, with a 50% increase in brain plastics from 2016-2024 for 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 — 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 perpetuated climate pollution, through real-izing “the good, true, and beautiful.” He urges forth the hyperconscious reckoning 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 as we look back on his words from a time of unprecedented ‘neuro-plasticity.’ SPOONFED’s glitchy crossroads place discourse directly on the absurd essentialist ultimatum between criminalized healing drugs and normalized toxic pollutants, of which the disregard and controversies surrounding both are mutually productively revealing as societal mirrors on taboo bodily substances. The satirical nature of SPOONFED provokes an unsettling discomfort, scrying into contemporary lack of awareness and agency regarding issues in our own bodies. Layers of deeply genuine sentiments, with the juxtaposition of cliches, exaggerations, and contrasting ideas portray multi-sensory post-post-ironic critique of the infrastructural, artistic, and environmental shortcomings of our civilization.

Location: NYC’s Wall Street

The six dancers pose around Wall Street’s famous Charging Bull statue, to show 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 the Trump 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, and how naive Americans are to how industrial wastefulness causes disproportionate damages on the world stage.

Method: Screendance as Political Response

SPOONFED proposes the value of art as research, with screendance as a method to make unprecedented global challenges visible and politically compelling. As a screendance work, SPOONFED brings the primordial poetics of the body to meet the introspective and documentary capacities of film, 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. Film as mirror and critique can resonate and catalyze healing in individual, ecological, and institutional bodies. Health is deeply tied to harmonious bodily relations with our environment — from our communities, to landscapes, to materials (like pollutants 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 quantum uncertainty is digitized via glitch aesthetics that mimic ecodelic perception of nature. These mythic personages convey transcendental emotions, as the states of consciousness of higher dimensions.

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 plastic 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, she is fragments of ‘the new’ nature and humanity, that are built from timeless archetypal myths that emerged from ancient ecodelic relations, alive within intergenerational embodied knowledge.

Together, these watery and firey personages show how dance is an elemental transmutation, that builds from mythic archetypes in the universal unconscious to address contemporary crises, as symbolized by the plastic spoon. This satirical investigation of character asks, will Mckenna’s “birth of a new kind of humanity” be one of embodying the rapidly transformative 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?