Let’s first agree that Earth is a pluriverse. Our precarious small planet, our shared quantum nutrient, has many worlds nested within it: worlds which overlap, communicate, barricade, war, and copulate. We, the community of Grens, are cultivating our own small pocket world among the millions of parallel realities in Berlin. The Gren world creeps through urban parks and along the canals, grasping tightly to Earth’s manifold non-human worlds; put neatly, we’re all outdoor kids surviving city life. As artists and as queers, we can’t help but mythologize our place on this planet, peering behind speculative veils, crafting lore for recreation and for meaning-making. This is how we came to Gren: it was a word spotted in some bit of Genoan graffiti, and it stuck to us like a burr; it was the vocabulary seed that has grown into our sprawling garden of theory and practice.

Gren is a modus operandi; it is the behavioral vehicle with which we explore our world and others. Certain creatures can be appreciated as Gren archetypes or mascots – for example, imagine a seahorse with chinchilla fur – but Gren is a force that can possess any of us if we choose to let it in. Gren is also an aesthetic; something or someone who is Gren is organically textural, cutely feral, psychedelic and a strange jokester (Gren can be serious, but never self-serious). Gren is also cyborg, and weaves the alien and the robot into its Terran palette of thought. Gren is relational: a queer, poly-pan-amorous entanglement with all organic matter. It may or may not be asexual, and it is not necessarily innocent. Grens can be characterized as ecosensual, hilarious, evolutionary, procreational, anarchic. We embrace internal contradictions, complications, and discomforts. The process of Grenning is ‘bewildering’ and ‘be-wilding,’ as opposed to rewilding, because we Grens were never not wild. To Gren is to put on goggles that grant us access to a parallel reality in which all of these qualities are prefigured, lived out in daily life as we navigate the wider World(s)™.

The Gren MO, has been, in a practical sense, a multi-year uncultivated tapestry of community lore and practice. It began within chosen family relationships and our shared practices of Lebenskunst (the art of LIVING), and is continually unfolding into many manifestations that invite others into the world of Grens, through gatherings, writings, and sonic narratives. We are not a collective in the formal sense, but a cooperative in the informal sense; we simply operate together. Our co-created Gren world tethers to the Pluriverse with an open portal adorned with a WELCOME mat. The next portal will open on April 12th, 2024. 

Naturopathic Somaesthetics is a world-based fashion practice. It manifests through a live workshop series that plays with the relationship between the incarnate self (the 1st body) and the earth (2nd body). Through fashioning foraged organic and geographic materials onto one’s own skin, a somatic dialogue is developed with local landscape through attention to texture, temperature, pressure, sound, and smell. Rooted in Jack Halberstam’s queer theory of bewilderment, Naturopathic Somaesthetics dissolved the narrative of separation between humans and the supra-human environment.

“I first put the stalks of aloe plant down my pants. When I walk, my body is imobilized at the hip. I feel the pressure of my waistband nicely tug on my back, pulled by the stiff rods. The pronged stalk top jab my shoulders pleasantly; if I shimmy, I feel it in my legs.”

“I lean into a tree. Its long soft leaves dance on my exposed skin. My weight supported by a constellation of contact points, the flexibility of the thin branches allows me to sway buoyantly; I learn the elasticity of its wood through my own springing movements. The sun warms my back, and I learn how it feels the sun at this time of day, too. There is no pain in this one, only pleasure and a soft rocking that soothes.”

“I wear aloe steaks like gloves. With my buck knife, I slice into the thick jelly. It is almost too erotic to be doing in public; fisting aloe. The sounds (like lasagna), the mucus that pulls away on my fingers, which are made pinker in contrast with the acidic bright green. When fully inserted, my hand is transformed into a ridged long point.”