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".
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
DISABLED ECOLOGIES
POLITICAL IMAGINARY: ANOTHER LANDSCAPE IS POSSIBLE
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.
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!
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.
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.