Wet Words and Dirty Talk: speaking through ecosex intimacies in the work of Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens

Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens’s Ecosexual practice makes an erotic appeal to embrace a new version of environmental politics. This is modelled on taking the Earth as lover, to give something back, rather than as Mother from whom we constantly take. They extend intimate sensual care for their own bodies to that of the Earth, getting down and dirty in a way that re-engages ‘the personal is political’. With everything from the feel of feet in mud, skinny-dipping and skygasms to marrying the sea, the snow, and the mountains, their various eco-intimacies enter into a complex dialogue with the non-human that does not so much speak for, as speak with and through. In an interesting reflection on the nature of these interactions, their latest film, Water Makes Us Wet is narrated by the Earth ‘herself’, as Sprinkle and Stephens conduct their ecosexual researches around the threatened watersheds of California. ‘She’ criticises how she has been anthropomorphised, but insofar as she is given a voice by them, it is one that speaks back.

While lover, mother, and irritable critic are unarguably anthropomorphic, and put human language into non-human ‘mouths’, maybe trauma and mute paralysis in the face of ecological catastrophe necessitate a proxy speech? Or a more visceral, earthbound language? As Annie and Beth roll naked in soil during numerous performances, they seem to compost themselves, disaggregating their subjectivities, their authority, in an entropic and erotic unforming that symbolically lets the earth do the talking. What kind of speech might be composed out of the new aggregate?

• http://londoncritical.org/2019-programme