What Makes a Weed a Weed? (w/ Jill Sigman)

What is a weed, anyway? Is it a scientific term? Is there something all weeds have in common?

I sat down with interdisciplinary artist Jill Sigman to get some answers.

Listen HERE or wherever you get your podcasts!

Photo by Frank diMeo

Photo by Scott Shaw

Jill Sigman is an interdisciplinary artist and agent of change who choreographs with bodies and materials. She founded jill sigman/thinkdance in 1998 to think about pressing social issues through the body, and in 2016, she founded “Body Politic”, a program of workshops and performance laboratories to ask salient political questions somatically. Working with things we throw away such as “garbage” and “weeds”, Sigman helps us to understand the connections between social justice, racial justice, and environmental justice and to envision a world in which we re-connect with the natural world and each other in meaningful and empathic ways. Sigman was the first Gibney Community Action Artist in Residence; has been in residence at Movement Research, Guapamacátaro Interdisciplinary Residency in Art and Ecology (Mexico), The Rauschenberg Residency, MANCC, and the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research at NYU; and is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University. She was born and raised in Brooklyn.

Episode Bibliography:

Follow Jill @thinkdance

Become a patron of Ecology & Me to keep the questions going: www.Patreon.com/EcologyandMe

Follow us on social @ecologyandme

Episode recorded, mixed and produced by Kate Douglas

Theme song is by Matthew Dean Marsh