Ruderal Witchcraft, 2025. Multispectral imaging of Amaranth palmeri in a wheat field north of Wichita, KS.
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2025. Multispectral imaging of Amaranth palmeri in a wheat field north of Wichita, KS.
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Peering into the construction site for the new $44 million police training headquarters in San Pablo, CA
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Peering into the construction site for the new $44 million police training headquarters in San Pablo, CA
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Oriental bittersweet grows through the pavement in Charleston, West Virginia
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Oriental bittersweet grows through the pavement in Charleston, West Virginia
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Photograph by Oliver Kellhammer
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Photograph by Oliver Kellhammer
Ruderal Witchcraft in Blanchard, Oklahoma, 2025.
Ruderal Witchcraft in Blanchard, Oklahoma, 2025.
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Photographs by Oliver Kellhammer
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Photographs by Oliver Kellhammer
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. A feather catches on spent Japanese knotweed blossoms
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. A feather catches on spent Japanese knotweed blossoms
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Peering at the NSA datacenter through Artemesia tridentata near Bluffdale, Utah.
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Peering at the NSA datacenter through Artemesia tridentata near Bluffdale, Utah.
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Rubble, Riot, Gate
Ruderal Witchcraft, 2024. Rubble, Riot, Gate
Ruderal Witchcraft is an eco-interventionist art project and forthcoming book by Margaretha Haughwout and Oliver Kellhammer connecting practices specific to planetary, weedy natures that work their way at edges and interstices of private properties, public spaces, and wastelands. The term 'ruderal' comes to us from biologists who define it as plant life that not only thrives in disturbance, but rapidly reproduces and is highly adaptable to changing environmental conditions, whether those be avalanches, earthquakes, or capitalogenic processes. While ruderality does not begin with the market system it does, along with demonized human subjects (such as witches and devil worshippers), take on new dimensionality as the process of commodification instantiates itself through a dialectic of value and anti-value; where witches and weeds are dismissed as hostile to property, wage labor, and other fetishized commodity forms. Ruderal Witchcraft is the composition of extra-human accomplices that emerges in the margins as the commodity frontier sweeps across Europe and its colonies. Our forthcoming book outlines the material practices of ruderal witchcraft, which include ruderal love, invisibility and binding spells for simultaneous sabotage and retreat; practices of timecraft such as necromancy and grief in the ruins; shapeshifting with hyperecologies and hyperorganisms; fugitive commoning; and healing, remediation, and danger in unruly landscapes.