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Meet at Cushion Works at 6pm
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Since their Wedding to the Earth in 2008, Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle have fleshed out, so to speak, their ecosexual position. Through an extensive practice of performance, discussion, filmmaking, and installation, they invite the Earth to be their lover, rethinking the nurturer-nurtured dichotomy of mother and all the gendered expectations that come with it while embracing reciprocal pleasure and queer ecologies. The connections unlocked by this way of thinking (and feeling) extend our relationships to the living and non-living forms that make up the Earth, whether through gently massaging the Earth with our feet or having intercourse with the air we breathe while inhaling into and exhaling out of our lungs. As Annie put it on one of their early walking tours of the desert: “In every grain of sand is an entire erotic universe waiting to be explored.”
The Lab’s first year of programming around the compost pile—subtitled the wet and the dry for the compositional mixture and balance of raw materials in healthily decomposing soil—begins with a walking tour by Beth Stephens, including a special cameo by Annie Sprinkle, who both remind us again and again that “water makes us wet.” This ecosexual walking tour, with their longtime collaborator Amanda Starbuck, explores boobies—that is, the water bird that occasionally appears in the San Francisco landscape—tracing a path from The Lab, to the 465 Collective and then to Cushion Works. This walking tour is in conjunction with an exhibition of Beth & Annie’s work, Bazoombas in Love, opening October 23 at Cushion Works, and with the nonprofit, E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF.
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle have been collaborating on multimedia art projects exploring love, sex, queerness, and the sensuality of nature for 25 years. Annie was a sex worker from 1973 to 1995, then became a feminist performance artist and sex educator. Beth was a sculptor and installation artist and is a university professor. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz for over 30 years. The duo produces feature films about environmental issues through an ecosexual lens. They create visual art, lead devised walking tours, curate symposia, collect archives, and participate in performance artivism. Their Ecosex Manifesto (2011) launched the Ecosex Movement. Their most recent feature film, Playing with Fire—An Ecosexual Emergency (2025), was partly funded by a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and was the third of their trilogy. Their book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position—the Earth as Lover (University of Minnesota Press), shares their epic love story and art/life adventures. View their work at sprinklestephens.org.
Amanda Starbuck is an interdisciplinary artist and climate advocate exploring how humans and nature entangle. With experience leading accountability campaigns and mobilizing communities across Europe and the Americas, her work blends performance, activism, and imagination to confront environmental crises with creativity and care.
The Lab’s programming from 2025-28 uses the compost pile as a model to think with. The compost pile as a mechanism and site necessitates a diversity of roles and processes—human and non-human, living and non-living—and its success hinges on mutual interdependence. The first season of programming, titled the wet and the dry (2025-26) for the (de)compositional makeup of organic materials in healthy compost, explores the broad themes of ecological and interspecies collaboration and exchange through a vital materialism. In following years, we will trace this line of inquiry through an exploration of archival renewal and regeneration titled turning the heap (2026-27) and an envisioning of new, collaborative models for arts ecosystems in the mycelial web (2027-28).
Thank you to Teiger Foundation for their support of this project through their special initiatives grantmaking.
