A Conversation with Nance Klehm
In terms of my other projects, Social Ecologies is my
business site and Spontaneous Vegetation is more my activist/artist/provocateur/public
educator site. You’ll see with a lot of my projects—especially the one around
human waste, which I have worked professionally on this too, working in Haiti,
etc.—when I’m working on it in that provocateur place, my whole point is not to
be scatological for people in an urban area to poop along with me, and I
collect all the waste and compost and bring it back to me. But I got a huge
amount of press for that—national press, Time magazine, etc., etc. Or my big
worm project. These things are not to be icky, but I’m trying to go with the
most base level of, what is our relationship to our own bodies. If we care
about our own bodies, how do we care about other beings and our immediate habitat?
It’s not just an environment, it’s a habitat. How do we treat the land that’s
around us? That’s still an underpinning of that project. People just thought I
was being funny or scatological or something, and I’m like, “No, this is
empowering and this is about reconnecting with our bodies and see the landscape
as well as our body is the same. I was trying to get that across, but I kind of
fell short for a lot of people. I did it with a lot of humor, because you can’t
avoid it, right? And I did it with a lot of artistic strategies to get people
to look at these things.
You could just pick out any other project and look at those
sites and if anything else pops out you can use it because I still feel like
it’s the same through line.
People think I do a lot of different things. I’m like,
“Yeah, but it’s all the same spider.”
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