SIX ZINES IN SIX DAYS (2022)
During my residency at the Performing Arts Forum in St.Erme, France, I dove deep into my personal connections to queer ecology. This resulted in a series of six zines made in six days, that hold the fluctuating and entangled complexity of my queer body in a ecological world. You can download the .pdfs for print here!
THE HERBARIUM (2021- at Zone2Source, School for Multispecies Knowledges, Amsterdam)
a library of weeds - the small, partial and wild stories of more-than-human attempts of collaborative survival. An ongoing collecting of plant-human relationships. An encounter with the fringes, the unruly edges of anthropocentric infrastructures... The HERBARIUM is a performance series in which humans collaborate with weeds, finding resistance strategies, resilience, community and interspecies friendships. Click here to get to Project website.
Toni Kritzer is a trans*, white, chronically ill/disabled performance artist, based in Amsterdam. There and elsewhere, they forage for stories beyond the human, and share these stories through artistic research, critical walking practices, and performance. Toni is committed to marginalized ecologies, more-than-human storytelling, and interspecies collaborations with local ecosystems.
From their upbringing in the rural south of Germany, they carry embodied knowledge of agricultural practices and folklore, making them a student of landscapes. With a background in theater, their work is interdisciplinary and includes performance, writing, facilitating, and communal gardening. In 2024, they graduated from the Academy of Theater and Dance Amsterdam with a degree in Theater Directing, though they are more interested in providing tools for collective navigation rather than in giving directions. At the ATD, they initiated a community garden in 2023, where they host a series of events that anchor gardening within art education, and explore/embody ecological (community) care. Toni’s work has been featured in Festivals such as Amsterdam Fringe in 2024, invited to grow in residencies (Zone2Source, hooops, cittadellarte) and they are regularly invited to host lectures and workshops. Most recently, they are tending to narratives of disability and illness within ecosystems, following slugs, viruses, and weeds. In September 25, they have started a Master's programme at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, called "Monstrous Futurities".
(WASTE)LAND (2022-23)
In the ecological crisis we find ourselves in, we need to become earthly/terrestrial again - rooting ourselves in the ecosystems. In the performance (WASTE)LAND, I bury my body in the ground up to the neck to re-imagine soil by becoming a part of it - a deep connection forged through previously unknown proximity. The performing body becomes an offering to the soil, an invitation to the many microbes to sequester the carbon we are made of, an attempt at relating deeply with what sustains life itself. (WASTE)LAND is an encounter between the soil and my own body in a state of co-transformation.
TRANSOPOCENE (2023)
Welcome to the TRANSOPOCENE: a week’s study of how to live and thrive in a cis economy. In this ongoing End of the World, the cistem is crashing, and we’re throwing an afterparty in the ruins of gender. SNDO graduating students Juli Frodermann and alex blum along with Toni Kritzer invite one another and other conspirators into workshops and hangouts that center trans* curiosity, rest, rhythms, play, friendship, and joy. TRANSOPOCENE is our small world in the making - a speculative experiment for a temporary community of critical friends, lovers, and intimate strangers. We explore what a trans* optimist time and space might sound and feel like, gathering everyday aesthetics, eerie rhythms, and gender euphoric somatic practices that make collective flourishing possible.
THE GARDEN ABOVE THE SCHOOL
community garden on the rooftop of the Academy of Theater and Dance, Amsterdam
Toni hosts the garden gatherings, regular events to anchor ecological care within art education. The garden gatherings are moments where entanglements become visible, where we collectively tend to a blooming and growing future of ecological care rather than give into the despair of looming climate collapse. Often, we invite an artist (or a small collective) whose practice relates to gardening, to share their work or ideas, and merge their artistic practice with the hands-on work of tending to the plants on the rooftop.
see instagram: thegardenabovetheschool for current events!
THE SICK GARDEN (2025)
performance and artistic research into crip ecologies, last shown at Four Siblings, Zone2Source, and Allard Pierson Museum
The Sick Garden entangles my story of illness with the life of a garden in need of care.
Questioning narratives of disability and sickness in ecosystems and in ourselves, it asks how healing might be possible beyond restoration. The sick garden is a story of slugs and viruses, molds, contamination and care: As the climate collapses, ancestral knowledge of seasons and sowing times, of planting and harvesting destabilize below our feet. We will need to deal with sick ecosystems all the time, as ecological relations unravel. We will need to build gardens, and futures, where disease and disability have a place.
The sick garden is an artistic research project, a performance and a workshop. Slipping between documentary and speculative methodologies, the sick garden becomes a vessel to hold stories of care, disability, and the ecological world.
HUTAN-HANTU (haunted forest) (2024)
performance with Lou Jelena Seidel, shown at Amsterdam Fringe 2024 at Frascati 4/Bellevue Theater, tracing the colonial past/present of the wooden floorboards used on Dutch stages
GARDENING AS SPECULATIVE FICTION/TENDING-TO/CULTIVATING BELONGING
MARGINALIZED ECOLOGIES
QUEER ECOLOGIES
DISABLED ECOLOGIES
POLITICAL IMAGINARY: ANOTHER LANDSCAPE IS POSSIBLE
THIS COULD BE A FOREST (2024)
temporary autonomous zone at the Academy of Theater and Dance, graduation work with Inge Gutzeit and many others. What can a forest teach us about community? Between the real and the impossible, what can the trees tell us of a better future? We imagine and build alternative ways of living and artmaking, the utopian horizon glistening in our eyes. In this assembly of many voices, humans and non-humans are meeting each other with kindness, curiosity and a radical desire for a better life. Once you enter the forest, you weave yourself into the mushroom networks: together, we make + share breakfast/lunch/dinner each day, sit
around the bonfire and tell stories, organize and attend workshops - dreaming about another art school, one that can be a home to all of us.
click here for a zine documenting the event.
VOICES OF AMELISWEERD (2023) with the Forest Theater Collective
The centuries-old trees of Amelisweerd are in danger of being cut down to widen the A27. In resistance, the Markiezenbos becomes a stage for forest creatures, activists, and artists. Climbing, singing, and dancing, they invite Utrecht residents, neighbors, and fellow activists to immerse themselves in the story of the forest and the resistance to deforestation.
What can we learn from the 1982 occupation?
What does it mean for the climate crisis, Dutch nature, and our society that we sacrifice forests for highways?
What does the forest teach us about coexistence, inclusivity, attention, care, and hope in times of oppression and climate crisis?
The voices of Amelisweerd have a lot to say on these issues!
THE JOY OF INTERDEPENDENCY (2025)
portrait in de Theaterkrant, upcoming
GEOSPECULATION (practice)
an embodied practice: telling the fictional/non-fictional stories of a place while moving through it. We see these stories as mythological groundwork for future modes of cohabitation, blurring the divides between body and landscape, myth and reality, ancient wisdom and new fables, past and future narratives.
STORYTELLING AND WRITING
(MAKING MEANING WITH WORDS)
RIVERBED (2025),
research and installation made at Unidee residency program, Citadellarte, Biella, Italy
Our bodies do not end at the skin, bodies of water do not end at their surface”. (Sunaura Taylor) Deepening their research into disabled ecologies, Toni Kritzer has been following the stream of the river Cervo. In its cold waters, they have found bubbling histories of hydrotherapy, pollution, and river restoration efforts. Questioning narratives of illness and disability within ecosystems, they wonder: how does it feel like to be a sick river, to run dry, to flood, to tumble across the rocks? In their time at Cittadellarte, Toni has been embroidering a blanket of stones: to lay their crip body down in the riverbed.
over here