I'm Esther Hernandez, or Esther Hz, and I am a local Denver artist and curator. So I used to be an urban farmer; I went to permaculture school, well, first I just started gardening–and this was before I was working in the arts. I fell in love with it, it became my whole life. 

I love also foraging. My favorite foraging moment was: I remember camping…I found milkweed in its perfect state, so I harvested milkweed, onions–like wild onions, and then I think I harvested some kind of natural green, and I sauteed all of that up and then ate it with the grain that I had, I think it was quinoa. It was incredible. It was so special to just eat from the land that I was camping on. The way that we eat can be so taxing on the earth. And so permaculture–I feel like if we all kind of thought that way and reoriented ourselves that way, a lot of things would change.

 I know a lot about different kinds of farming, but I had never dove into biodynamics. I am also interested in animation and movement and performance and interactivity, and something that I really wanted to make was a zoetrope. And the coolest thing is too is the word “zoetrope” actually translates into “wheel of life.” This is the perfect opportunity to create a zoetrope because we're really talking about our relationship with the earth here, and the way it nourishes us. And so one of them was really pointing specifically to the biodynamic farming practice. I had been playing with this idea of the soil of the earth kind of representative of the soul of the earth because the soil is really where we come from and where we go to die. If we lose our relationship with the soil, we die. And that's what's happening right now. Soil health is in a crisis because of all of the corporate agriculture that's happening. We're completely depleting the nutrients from the soil. 

I sat with all of these quotes in history that were talking about the soul of man, and I decided to see what would happen if I took out the word “soul” and replaced it with the word “soil.” and it was like pure magic. “For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose the health of his soul?” “For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world,” which is what we're doing, “yet lose the health of his soil.” You lose everything. It really did, for me encompass, our relationship with the earth and how we are so interconnected yet we're not taking care of it, and we're in turn not taking care of ourselves.