HORT/CULTURE: Nonhuman Teachers + Erik "Lizardman" Sprague

Please join us in the West Room of Nine Orchard for a celebratory evening of all things chimerical from Precambrian protists to post-punk rockers.

A very curious event took place ~1.5 billion years ago when an ancient cell first figured out how to envelop a symbiotic bacterium, after which life became chimerical, symbiotic, open-ended, collage-like, and weird. In conjunction with the release of their newest book, Chimera World (Apogee Press, 2024) Nonhuman Teachers will present a multimedia lecture on the biological, artistic, and philosophical aesthetics of endosymbiosis. Following this presentation, we’ll be joined by artist, philosopher and professional freak Erik "Lizardman" Sprague to close out the evening with some sideshow whimsy and life lessons on becoming a modern-day chimera.

Further conversation, merriment and complimentary booze to follow at Aeon Books.

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Nonhuman Teachers is a collective of eco-freaks, artists, activists, wilderness advocates, joy seekers, composters, etc. seeking to make sense of our estrangement from the animate Earth. Through multidisciplinary public programming, immersive botanical spaces, and new nature media, the humans of Nonhuman Teachers aim to ignite a sense of wonder about our rapidly changing world and our precarious place in it.

Erik Sprague is an artist and an entertainer best known as Lizardman for his extensive body modifications including full-body tattoos, bifurcated tongue, sharpened teeth, and subdermal implants. As a professional freak, he regularly performs many classic sideshow acts such as fire eating, gavage, sword swallowing, the bed of nails, and the cranial corkscrew, among many others.

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HORT/CULTURE is brought to you by , a nonprofit organization that takes a new approach to ecological storytelling, blending science, art, and the imagination to help deepen the relationship between humans and the natural world. To learn more, please visit or email: [email protected].

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