Green Suits
Green Suits is an ongoing participatory photography project originally created by Beth Osnes. All participants in the Green Suits project don a full-body, spandex green suit with a leafy sash and submit a photograph of themselves embodying a spirit of green or engaging in green acts. Both the process of taking the photos and the photographs themselves spark unlikely conversations, and are a part of an ongoing effort to infuse play and broad engagement in greening our world. Sometimes it takes a literal representation of an idea to make it real. So far, the Green Suits project has taken three different forms—
1) Green Cities, an online collection of hundreds of photos submitted by dozens of photographers representing every continent on Earth hosted on the Inside the Greenhouse website and displayed at the CU Art Museum.
2) Green Suits Boulder Valley School District (BVSD), a district-wide school competition in Boulder, Colorado exhibited at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
3) Green Suits Your University, university residencies at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Barnard College, and University of Colorado.
A different future is possible, but sometimes it has to be imagined first as a conscious collective public act. Play is useful when exploring alternative ways in which we can interact with our environment since it expands the range of possibilities. Green Suits is an accessible, inclusive participatory action. Participants offer a non-verbal, non-threatening approach to visualizing how public commentary and action may occur. Both participants and audience members have ranged in age from 6 months old to over 70 years old. Dressed in a green suit, the participant is in the act of becoming a hopeful agent of change, capable of inspiring shifts in approaches and perception, which may ultimately result in reunification from the fiction of our human differentiation from the environment and the natural world. This belief in our oneness may inspire more spontaneous and joyful acts of green.
