"Discard Records" Screening and Conversation with sTo Len
Join Embodied Earth and artist, sTo Len, for a screening of Discard Records, a documentary-in-progress exploring New York City's waste management systems.
Recently serving as the NYC Department of Sanitation's Public Artist in Residence, sTo Len digitized over 500 hours of the department's footage, including union films, environmental programs, cartoons, and TV news broadcasts. Len's synthesis of an enormous media waste archive weaves together a history of New York City that can only be revealed through its waste.
Following the screening, Len will be in conversation with Embodied Earth's founder, Nicole Jackson, to discuss the history of waste management and labor in New York City, and the power of documentation and the archive amidst the climate crisis.
sTo Len is a genre fluid artist whose work has centered on place-based collaborations with abused landscapes and co-creations with communities and municipal agencies. The cross-disciplinary nature of Len’s practice spans printmaking, video, sound, performance, installation, drawing, and social practice work, threaded together by a site- responsive process of making. Recent projects have included a Trash Museum in Kyrgyzstan, a community pirate radio show in New Mexico, a series of plant-based printmaking while in residence at the Queens Botanical Garden in NY and an interactive
video installation at the Grand Canyon. Len was the first Artist in Residence at AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment facility in Virginia and the Public Artist in Residence at the NY Department of Sanitation. Len is based in Queens, NY with over two decades of residence in NY and familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia.
Embodied Earth is an interdisciplinary arts organization that connects New Yorkers to natural spaces through ecocritical arts events and activations.
Each Embodied Earth event creates an intentional partnership with an artist and environmental organization to investigate artists’ and artworkers’ obligation to the natural and built environment, and channel artmaking as an effective tool to inspire collective action.
Image Credit: sTo Len and Vincent Tullo
