Going (Paris) Green: A Spectacular Live Performance Exposing Environmental Greenwashing.

To be performed in Place Stravinsky, Paris, France, June 29, 2024, 7 PM.

What is behind the ‘green sheen’ of faux environmental marketing? What toxins are clothed in our clothes? This summer, on June 29th, 2024, the public is invited to Paris for a performance event, “Going (Paris) Green,” which will explore and expose the harsh chemical truths behind the manufacture of our supposedly sustainable, green, earth-friendly garments. This interactive performance project will take place in the heart of Paris, Place Stravinsky, where attendees will engage with the art in a live, interactive setting.

“Going (Paris) Green” is a remarkable collaboration between performance/installation artists Julie Laffin and Jennifer Natalya Fink, under the curation of Cléa Massiani. Echoing the arsenic-tinged ‘Paris Green’ craze of the 1800s, in “Going (Paris) Green,” Laffin and Fink present a visually arresting and thought-provoking spectacle involving a giant green dress. This dress, activated in a live performance, serves as a potent symbol of the ‘green sheen’ that companies often use to mask the negative environmental impact of their products.

From the parisgoinggreen.com website:

Everywhere you look, everyone is going green.
From Whole Foods to Target, the aisles are filled with ‘green’ products making vague claims to save the earth, save the whales,
save something or other. 
Even clothing is getting the green treatment: clothing tags claim 100% recycled, upcycled, bicycled!  
Green and more green. 
But most of these products use toxic dyes that seep into the skin of the wearers.  Even if they are recyclable, biodegradable plastic technically doesn’t degrade.  Microplastic is everywhere: in tap water, drip drop,
breast milk, and table salt. Recycling is a scam. 
91% of plastic is NOT recycled. Yet marketers sell us a green dream
​woven into the fabric of our clothes, our lives.

ABOUT THIS COLLABORATION

For thirty years, Jennifer Natalya Fink and Julie Laffin have loved each other’s work. For the past ten years, they have each faced crises of disability. Out of these intersecting personal experiences and political concerns emerged an ongoing collaboration of  installation performances at environmentally compromised locations including Superfund sites in African-American Midwestern parks and mold-infested U.S. university plumbing. 

Fink long admired Laffin’s monumental “Red Dress” series  of feminist interventions for their scale, audacity, and glorious embrace of the epic and awful dimensions of normative white femininity. Laffin admired Fink’s sardonic, embodied texts for their lucid cultural critique and delirious erotics. Both Fink and Laffin faced disability-related life crises, which led each to a larger critical vision of the environmental crisis disabling our planet. Joining creative forces, in 2017 they began a series of  installation performances,  the “Toxic Tango” series, that reveal hidden contaminants in site-specific, visceral, and embodied ways. In 2020, they launched “Underbelly,” extending this practice to an exploration of the racism of the feminist movement in which they are both so invested.
​
 In “Going Green,” Laffin and Fink extend the scope of this collaborative practice both in its scale, politics, and aesthetics. By working with the notion of greenwashing on a visual, conceptual, and formal level,  they will explore how bodies and materials can transform and intervene in the story an institution tells itself about how ‘green’ it is. First performed successfully at Rhizome Gallery DC, Laffin and Fink are going global—performing in Paris to explore the transnational poisonous clothing industry at its origin.

For more information, visit https://parisgoinggreen.weebly.com/about.html or contact Clea Massiani at [email protected] or via Instagram https://www.instagram.com/goingparisgreen/