Natural Resistance with the Guerrilla Grafters

Symposium:

• ISEA2017: 23rd International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Margaretha Anne Haughwout
• Ian Pollock

• The Guerrilla Grafters graft fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing, ornamental fruit trees. Over time, delicious, nutritious fruit is made available to urban residents through these grafts. We aim to prove that a culture of care can be cultivated from the ground up. We aim to turn city streets into food forests, and unravel civilization one branch at a time.

  For ISEA2017, we demonstrate how to graft urban fruit trees in the Recinto district of Manizales. The Guerrilla Grafters teach participants how to use their internet tools and different kinds of tagging — from graffiti to electronics to attach to branches (disseminating information about the graft to humans and bees), and offer take-home grafting kits. We provoke a discussion on how specific cultivation practices can resist capitalist and colonial regimes of power. Here, conflicts between a variety of fruit eaters might be recast as something to be embraced, and not positioned as the opposite to peace.

  We invite messy, rebellious solutions to the ways information can be shared for the purposes of expanding the urban commons in ways that simultaneously collapse binaries between public and private, nature and culture.

Recinto del Pensamiento

Category:

• Workshop