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DE-FENCE Part 1: Medicine in the Margins
August 12, 2023 @ 10:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT
Join us at NATURE Lab for a multi-sensory drawing and plant-sensing workshop with artist Margaretha Haughwout. We will discover medicinal plants growing in the marginal spaces and edge conditions of the neighborhood, discuss neighborhood environmental health conditions, explore practices connected to territorial defense, and sketch medicinal plants that have historically been used for the immune system. Participants will be given specially designed field notebooks where they can make observational notes and draw the medicinal plants they resonate with. With participants’ consent, the creative results of this workshop will be repurposed and made a part of the permanent, living DE-FENCE installation. This is Part 1 in the De-Fence series.
Location: NATURE Lab courtyard at 3319 6th Ave. Meet at the back gate.
Margaretha Haughwout works with humans, and the more-than-human, across technologies and ecologies, to cultivate a radical imagination that challenges proprietary regimes, colonial temporalities, and capitalist forms of labor. Her work manifests as speculative fabulation, intervention, participatory event, walking tour, experimental pedagogy, installation, and biological processes. Haughwout’s active collaborations include the Coven Intelligence Program, with efrén cruz cortés, the Guerrilla Grafters, and Ruderal Witchcraft with Oliver Kellhammer. She created and maintains the Food Forest Studio in Central New York.
Haughwout’s personal and collaborative artwork is exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently, at Stadwerkstatt in Linz, Austria, the Pixelache Festival in Helsinki, Finland, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California, and at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. Haughwout received her MFA from the University of California Santa Cruz. She is Associate Professor of Emerging Media at Colgate University.
This event is a collaboration between the iEAR Presents series with support from RPI’s ARTS department and School of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, and from the New York State Council for the Arts/ NYSCA, with The Sanctuary for Independent Media, and from NEA Our Town “Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail” creative placemaking grant.
DE-FENCE Project
DE-FENCE is a living installation and a series of community events at NATURE Lab under the umbrella of the Sanctuary’s growing Eco-Art Trail. The living installation is built in relationship to NATURE Lab’s back fence and the other emerging food forest networks and sign systems in the newly inaugurated space. DE-FENCE is an offering of perennial medicinal plants that support the immune system of humans while also enabling mutual support of the plants themselves and their critter companions through nutrient, structure, and insect attraction/ repulsion. The planting design and labeling system emerges out of community conversations and observation processes with the artist. DE-FENCE conflates collective health with territorial defense in opposition to medical and legal conceptions of immunity that derive from notions of private property.
We are committed to lowering the barriers to access for events at The Sanctuary for Independent Media. For people who are hard of hearing or deaf, blind or low-vision, or whose physical limitations can interfere with a satisfying experience, let us know two weeks in advance so we can make appropriate arrangements.
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