Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.)

// Mixed Media Repair Kit including artist book/repair manual, cassette tapes, mycelial objects, and binding container // Co-Created by Joan Greer, Lisa Moore, Sourayan Mookerjea, Mark Simpson, Jessie Beier, Tsēmā Igharas, Tegan Moore, Catlin Kelly-Kuzyk, and Jerome Tavé & Kyle Lawson (10th Floor Studio) as part of Speculative Energy Futures //

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) offers a host of situated activities and speculative probes designed to respond to today and tomorrow’s energy emergencies. Moving beyond conventional narratives of energy as a resource to be extracted or managed, E.E.R.K. probes the entanglements of energy, life, death, and interdependence, critically engaging with the extractive logics of racial-fossil capitalism and the infrastructures shaping our present and future.

Originally developed as part of Speculative Energy Futures, the project emerged in response to the pandemic moment of 2020, when disruptions to petrocultural business-as-usual made visible the long-roiling energy emergency. Instead of offering solutions, E.E.R.K. invites participants to rethink energy through acts of care, repair, and radical imagination. Energy is life. Energy is death. Energy involves investments and divestments -- of desire; of affective connection; of interspecies interdependence; of care and repair. 

E.E.R.K. Binder and Cassette Detail

E.E.R.K. Sample Pages

Each mycelium insert (created as an edition of 30) is unique from the others.

E.E.R.K. Mixtape Tracklists

Project Iterations

  • The FluxKit for Energy Transition — The FluxKit for Energy Transition was created as a part of Speculative Energy futures (led by Dr. Sheena Wilson and Dr. Natalie Loveless) under the banner of Just Powers–a research project on decolonial and intersectional climate justice & energy transition, that brings together scholarly inquiry, arts-based and creative process, and Indigenous spirit and ceremony, to explore diverse perspectives on the topic of just energy transition and climate justice.

  • SQUARE Residency, St. Gallen, Switzerland (November 2022) – The Speculative Energy Futures team showcased and animated the FluxKit for Energy Transition as the first visiting artists-in-residence at SQUARE, the University of St. Gallen’s interdisciplinary hub.

  • Publication with Fordham University Press – E.E.R.K. will be further explored in an upcoming publication, bringing its speculative methodologies and critiques of energy infrastructure to new audiences.

E.E.R.K. Sample Illustration (by jessie beier)