At the invitation of Dr. Rachael Grew and Dr. Anais Carlton-Parada, this September (2026) I am visiting Loughborough University as a fellow with Dr Marcelitte Failla to offer talks, a timecraft ritual, and conversation with scholars and artists thinking about the enchanted turn in the humanities. You can learn more here

This lovely anthology, the Witch Studies Reader, edited by Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward, is out through Duke University Press. Oliver Kellhammer and I have our essay in it, the Ruderal Witchcraft Manifesto: This manifesto outlines the stakes involved for practices specific to planetary, weedy natures that antagonize regimes of private property. Ruderal ecologies emerge in rubble, ruins, in waste spaces. Ruderal landscapes are landscapes of the poor and working classes, where nature is cheapened, or abandoned. Witches too, seem ruderal. Like ruderal plant and animal species, witchcraft operates in tension with ongoing waves of enclosure. This manifesto is a condensed version of a larger book project, and describes nine ways to conjure powers of ruderal witchcraft. These nine entanglements prioritize relationships over individual species; involve (contingent) healing, (re)mediation, and danger; require attunement to cooperation and shared resources; and enact 'timecraft' such as grief and necromancy. Active relationships with weedy species that primarily operate in everyday spaces of disturbance give guerrilla gardeners, activists, artists, witches, and other revolutionaries concerned with the threats of the Capitalocene new approaches to anti-capitalist magic, sabotage, and retreat. About the Reader: Stories about witches are by their nature stories about the most basic and profound of human experiences—healing, sex, violence, tragedies, aging, death, and encountering the mystery and magic of the unknown. It is no surprise, then, that witches loom large in our cultural imaginations. In academia, studies of witches rarely emerge from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners. The Witch Studies Reader brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical decolonial feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from exoticizing and pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global South. The authors show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Throughout, they account for the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which “the witch” is currently being claimed and repudiated. Offering a pathbreaking transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft that upends white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes, this volume brings into being the interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies. Contributors. Maria Amir, Ruth Asiimwe, Bernadette Barton, Ethel Brooks, Shelina Brown, Ruth Charnock, Soma Chaudhuri, Carolyn Chernoff, Saira Chhibber, Simon Clay, Krystal Cleary, Adrianna L. Ernstberger, Tina Escaja, Laurie Essig, Marcelitte Failla, D Ferrett, Marion Goldman, Jaime Hartless, Margaretha Haughwout, Patricia Humura, Apoorvaa Joshi, Govind Kelkar, Oliver Kellhammer, Ayça Kurtoğlu, Helen Macdonald, Isabel Machado, Brandy Renee McCann, Dev Nathan, Mary Jo Neitz, Amy Nichols-Belo, Allison (or AP) Pierce, Emma Quilty, Anna Rogel, Karen Schaller, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Shashank Shekhar Sinha, Gabriella V. Smith, Nathan Snaza, Shannon Hughes Spence, Eric Steinhart, Morena Tartari, Nicole Trigg, Katie Von Wald, Tushabe wa Tushabe, Jane Ward Fom Sophie Lewis author of Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation: In this impressive compendium, materialists and spiritualists, cyborgs and goddesses alike will find much to chew on. Witches of all genders, unite!

efrén cruz cortés and I have work as well as a long interview featured in Experimental Practices in Interdisciplinary Art: Engaging the Margins, edited by Antoinette LaFarge and Jesse Jackson: This is a book about artists as experimenters, thus a book about processes, working locations, and results. The fijifteen artists included here all take diffferent approaches to experimentation, research, and interdisciplinary work, but they face a common set of challenges in making their work, in circulating it, and in framing how it will be understood. While the history of the last century shows that artists are recognized as experimental in all kinds of ways, there are some areas that have remained outside the main streams of the art world. One of these lies at the intersection of art, science, and technology, and so with this book we are digging into how artists who work in that terrain are articulating the nature of experimentation and its role in cultural transformation. In this, they continue a lineage of artist-experimenters that includes those who flourished in the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) proto-incubator of the late 1960s and early 1970s or who surfaced in such exhibitions as Software -- Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (Jewish Museum, 1970) and Art and Technology (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971). Although many of their challenges remain the same, the subjects they are addressing have evolved considerably. It's an incredibly thoughtful book, filled with care and attention, and I'm honored to have work in it!.

In May 2024, I launched Part 2 of DE-FENCE at NATURE Lab in Troy NY. For the installation event, participants helped install deconstructed fence posts (specially carved with compositions that emerged from community drawing exercises), and planted medicinal seeds and seedlings from the artist's Food Forest Studio. We continued to discover already existing medicinal plants growing in the marginal spaces and edge conditions of the neighborhood, discussed neighborhood environmental health conditions, and discussed the ways that marginal medicinal plants can participate in the bioremediation and protection of the ecosocial communities around NATURE Lab. “The Line Becomes a Territory” is the header from a section in a forthcoming book entitled Ruderal Witchcraft by Margaretha, co-written with Oliver Kellhammer, and explores the ways that communities who want to resist the forces of capitalist accumulation can find power in, occupy, and expand boundary zones, edges and fence-lines. Accompanying the installation are risograph printed zines offering a materia medica of neighborhood medicinals, and a large format map and design of the DE-FENCE medicine forest.

In late summer 2023 I began DE-FENCE, a living installation and a series of community events at NATURE Lab under the umbrella of the Sanctuary for Independent Media'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. The DE-FENCE installation 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. These community conversation largely take shape during workshops, over collaborative drawing and plant-sensing exercises. PART 1 in the DE-FENCE series is a workshop where participants discover medicinal plants growing in the marginal spaces and edge conditions of the neighborhood, discuss neighborhood environmental health conditions, explore practices connected to autonomy, and wellness, 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 are repurposed and made a part of the permanent, living DE-FENCE installation. I am continuing the collaborative drawing and plant sensing beyond the August workshop into September as a part of the People's Health Sanctuary Healing Day series. DE-FENCE conflates collective health with autonomy and forest solidarities — in opposition to medical and legal conceptions of immunity that derive from notions of private property.

I made a kit for friends and comrades to co-create their own food forest worlds, due to interest in the Food Forest Futures installation at the Robert Frost Stone House in North Bennington, Vermont (see also this post about the installation). This is the preliminary kit, and I hope to keep adding information to it, so please check back! I am so excited that the artist and friend Azuré Keahi will be crafting with this kit at the New Nature Lab space and People's Health Sanctuary in Troy, New York this season (I'll also be co-creating medicine worlds in this space later in the summer as a way of complementing and supporting their radical vision and the amazing work happening there). Download the kit here. Introduction to the kit: This is a collection of information and design documents meant as inspiration and resource for artists and activists who are engaged in the building of food forest and medicine forest worlds. Primarily, this kit offers design documents for signage, but I hope to continue add materials and information for plant design considerations. History:This kit emerges from the Food Forest Futures living installation that I did at the Robert Frost Stone House in North Bennington Vermont, as a part of the Bennington College Center for Public Action's Mellon Foundation Grant on Food Scarcity. Bennington College was awarded $1 million from the Mellon Foundation to launch a three-year collaborative effort with local partners to address the systemic causes of food insecurity in Bennington County. In 2021, at the invitation of Tatiana Abatemarco and Erin McKinney, I created a living installation, a manifesto, and tabloid publication to inaugurate their research. Food Forest Futures draws from Indigenous, permaculture, and bio-intensive design strategies to introduce seven layers of a food forest, attract beneficial animals, microbes, and insects, and integrate plantings of beneficial, medicinal, edible plants. Rather than having one plant crop per row, plants are mixed together based on how they can help one another—through nutrients, structure, resistance to pests. These plant companions spark new understandings of how the cultivation of biodiverse food and habitat for our nonhuman kin simultaneously generates food and habitat for humans. Food Forest Futures recognizes differing opportunities for cultivating food forests, and hosted a number of events where participants connected to the Food Summit could choose combinations of plants, seeds, and associated reading materials on offer to continue commoning in backyard, community, or guerrilla / tactical contexts. Food Forest Futures was instantiated on the traditional and unceded territories of the Abenaki.

For ISEA2023 Symbiosis, The Coven Intelligence Program ran a collaborative writing workshop and speculative workstation that channels symbiotic stories of our revolutionary cosmology. We are so excited to continue this work and plan to run telematic channelings in the coming year.

The Coven Intelligence Program (myself and efrén cruz cortés) have work in the Art as Social Practice show at the SP/N Gallery in Dallas. The show is tied to the book I have writing in (with the same name), and edited by xtine burrough and Judy Walgren. The Coven Intelligence Program is a revolutionary, anti-capitalist alliance among witches, plants, and machines. In for which adamant ancestors read/ riotous futures in lands that once fed, the Coven offers an altar that doubles as a kind of cosmic detective's desk, the opportunity to write spells for a radical future, and other notes and materials tied to our cosmology. In our SpellWeaver application, spells are woven into visual patterns encoded in textiles, as well as into networks of connection between plants, rhizomes, and mycelia. Hiding in their structure, there are algorithmic instructions and prophetic signs only readable to unpaid plant, human, and machine laborers in the capitalist system of extraction and exploitation. The InsurgentEcologies Archive, also displayed, reveals some of the technologies, and ecologies destined to be transformed by the Coven's spellwork.

The Multi-Stellar Inter-Species Workers Union fights for the biotariat across galaxies, for the collectivization of all *solar systems*. As part of the stwst48x8, the “Voyager 2” will be sent an update. MSISWU invites interstellar workers of all species to the Third Intergalactic Commune to end the terra-de-formation of Earth. Fabi Borges and Philip Leitner are my human collaborators. The STWST curatorial statement begins: ”Finally, yes: DEEP is the New Dark. After Deep Politics, Deep Economy, Deep Industry or Deep Science, the new appropriation of depth continues. Art and research are moving into the deep. We are mining and fracking our minds. In DEEP we find not only Deep Learning, Mind or Data, but also Deep Fake, Deep Exploitation, a lot of contradictions and an archaic mixture of mud, Gaia, Meta, Weltgeist, pre-modernity, of wild thinking, dark mirrors and speculation.

I was so honored to be invited to be in conversation with Ciclón, Maya, and Oliver about Ciclón's talk, Quantum Constellations: Casting a Circle of Protection in the Necrocene: "This lecture introduces critical encounters with wildlife and roadkill in the place settlers renamed as New Jersey; called Lenapehoking at least 10,000 years prior. Transmedia fragments (poetry, photography, video, storytelling) will be used to frame affective engagements with eco grief and hope, creating a dialectic between exoteric and esoteric narrations. The talk will introduce intersectional philosophies that connect critical animal studies with the Sixth Great Extinction. Transportation networks, such as the railroad and highway, will be interrogated in relation to their extractive legacies and discussed alongside feral justice, the multispecies commons, and creaturely care ethics. At its core, Ciclón's lecture will animate a discussion about the role played by aesthetics, magic, and quantum enchantment in more than human entanglements." I loved Ciclón's talk so much, and how they offered the gift of time through grief and relationship.

In early June 2022 I gave the closing plenary at the World-Ecology Research Network conference in Bonn, Germany. I presented the Ruderal Witchcraft Manifesto, the ongoing collaborative writing and interventionist art project co-produced with Oliver Kellhammer. An introduction to this work will be published in The Witch Studies Reader, edited by Soma Chaudury and Jane Ward, and out through Duke University Press early next year. "Through Working Environments, Unruly Natures, the 2022 meeting of the World-Ecology Research Network speaks to the work/life nexus of planetary justice. Highlighted by recent calls for a Green New Deal and Degrowth, we will explore the intimately connected -- and profoundly global -- dimensions of work, workers, and life across the long history of the capitalist world-ecology. Recognizing the dialectic of productive and reproductive work as the pivot of modern environment-making and class formation, [WERN invited] paper and session proposals that unpack the connective relations between work, working bodies, and working environments -- past, present, and future. [WERN situated] capitalism's mobilization of paid and unpaid work in their racialized, gendered, colonial, and multi-species moments. This includes the deep history of labor politics, working class protest, and social revolution in their connections with world-ecological crises and capitalist restructuring. Identifying the strategic relations between neoliberal dispossession, proliferating climate disasters, and widening indequality, Working Environments, Unruly Natures pursues new syntheses, narratives, and conceptualizations of twenty-first century crisis that can inform the emergent politics of planetary justice."

I was thrilled to be in conversation with environmental lawyer Sinead Mercier (Author of Men Who Eat Ringforts), Gareth Kennedy and Seoidin O'Sullivan for TURNING GROUND, organized by the National College of Art and Design and the Digital Hub in Dublin.The conversation was rich and wide ranging, continuing to return to themes of property, the history of enclosures, conceptions of nature, and who gets to count as kin. I am indebted to Gareth and Seoidin, as well as the curator Anne Kelly for their vision and organizing of this event. The National College of Art and Design, Dublin (NCAD) and The Digital Hub present a programme of public talks titled, TURNING GROUND Talks Series 2022. This is the second year in which the two organisations have partnered in this way: the 2022 series creates a platform to bring together local and international artists, community, activists, academics and practitioners to discuss art ecology projects, research and practice. Together, they will imagine just socio-ecological futures with a focus on the Dublin 8 neighbourhood. NCAD | The Digital Hub Turning Ground Talks Series 2022 is convened by artists, Gareth Kennedy, NCAD Fine Art lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practice & course leader of NCAD FIELD and Seoidín O'Sullivan, The Digital Hub Artist-In-Residence, NCAD Visual Culture guest lecturer in Art, Ecology & Critical Spatial Practice and NCAD First Year Studio Practice tutor.

This year I completed Food Forest Futures for the Bennington Food Summit and their 3-year Mellon Grant to address food insecurity in Southern Vermont. I was so fortunate to have the opportunity to do this project over two years, ideal when working with site, and more-than-human life. The project now has permanent steel signs with phrases from my Food Forest Futures manifesto, and etched plant labels, showing information layers of the food forest and weaving throughout. There is also now a tabloid publication. It is my hope that community members will continue to plant food plants to the installation, and there is a Bennington College student who is already adding some more chestnuts!

Grafters X Change is a bioregional eco-art event where fruit tree enthusiasts throughout Central New York converge to share scionwood and seeds, skills, fruit foods, and art projects in a collaborative and interdisciplinary setting. We are committed to ecological justice and honor ancestral legacies of multispecies collaboration and care. Grafters X Change had an apocalypse-responsive format in spring of 2022, offering online streaming content, scion exchanges on two consecutive Saturdays, an exchange of scions and seeds by mail, a publication, and other hybrid events. It was amazing! I learned so many new things and am so incredibly grateful for the connections across rural, urban and post-industrial landscapes, and I miss everyone immensely. Many thanks to ongoing GXC inspirations and collaborations with Oliver Kellhammer, Marisa Prefer, Greg Owens, in deep gratitude for the work and friendship of Ariel Cooper, Anthony Paul Farley, Diana Gildea, Cheryl Meeker, Jason W. Moore, Margaret Rhee, e.e Vera, and all presenters. Online media content for GXC generated with assistance from Colgate students Cassi Bielmeier, Emma Kaminski, Leila Ribeiro, Jen Trujillo, and Michael Watson. This project was greatly aided by the dedication of Colgate staff members Lesley Chapman, Kevin Donlin, Julie Dudrick, Angela Kowalski, Lois Wilcox, and Mark Williams. Grafters X Change is generously supported by the Colgate Arts Council and the Upstate Institute, as well as by the Sylvia Ellins Fund for the Teaching and Learning of Diversity, the Departments of Art & Art History and Geography, the Environmental Studies and Educational Studies Programs, Core Challenges of Modernity, and the Divisions of Arts and Humanities, University Studies, and Natural Sciences and Mathematics at Colgate. GXC partners include the Southern Madison Heritage Trust and the Village of Hamilton Tree Commission, with special thanks to the Upstate Institute for the funding of this publication. GXC partners include the Southern Madison Heritage Trust and the Village of Hamilton Tree Commission.

I have an essay entitled “Witch-Plant-Machine: Speculative Histories and Planetary Justice” in the book Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change, and is in print! Edited by xtine burrough and Judith Walgren and published through Routledge. "With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores how artists use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities, create change, and bring forth social impact through new technologies and digital practices. Suzanne Lacy's Foreword and section introduction authors Anne Balsamo, Harrell Fletcher, Natalie Loveless, Karen Moss, and Stephanie Rothenberg present twenty-five in-depth case studies by established and emerging contemporary artists including Kim Abeles, Christopher Blay, Joseph DeLappe, Mary Beth Heffernan, Chris Johnson, Rebekah Modrak, Praba Pilar, Tabita Rezaire, Sylvain Souklaye, and collaborators Victoria Vesna and Siddharth Ramakrishnan. Artists offer firsthand insight into how they activate methods used in socially engaged art projects from the twentieth century and incorporated new technologies to create twenty-first century, socially engaged, digital art practices. Works highlighted in this book span collaborative image-making, immersive experiences, telematic art, time machines, artificial intelligence, and physical computing. These reflective case studies reveal how the artists collaborate with participants and communities, and have found ways to expand, transform, reimagine, and create new platforms for meaningful exchange in both physical and virtual spaces. An invaluable resource for students and scholars of art, technology, and new media, as well as artists interested in exploring these intersections.

Chandra Russo has published two scholarly articles examining the Guerrilla Grafters. The first, entitled "The art of care: Urban oppositional practices and the case of the Guerrilla Grafters," is through City. The second is "Cities of Fruit: Arts Intervention and the Radical Imagination" through American Quarterly. I love reading these articles and learning new perspectives on this beloved project.

In 2019, I met many incredible artists, curators and scholars at an artist residency in Chiapas, five of whom I went on to create with in a variety of ways. One ongoing conversation resulted in this experimental essay that reflects on the residency we attended: "Written collectively by six femme and queer scholars and artists, this piece is both a critical reflection and creative intervention into art residencies and Zapaturismo (political tourism) in Chiapas, Mexico. Drawing upon our embodied experiences of moving through the Lacandon jungle as part of a well-intentioned yet colonial-minded arts residency, we ruminate on the ethics, practices, and failures of solidarity between North American feminists, people of color, and queer people with Indigenous communities in Mexico under siege. We ask: what are we really searching for when we seek out the Zapatistas, and why participate in “activist art” residencies staged in the Global South? Each section of the article is a collaboratively written vignette that offers multiple vantage points to analyze our individual and collective experiences at the residency that occurred within and between three places in Chiapas: the city of San Cristobal de las Casas, a rural Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or EZLN) caracol, and at a cooperative on the Tonalá shore. Utilizing personal and poetic reflections along with scholarly and political frames, we summon lessons gleaned that will continue to impact our ongoing work with our respective places and communities. To truly listen to the Zapatistas, we conclude, we must take very seriously their messages to our group given in a moment of crisis, to work from our own locations and to transform our own understanding and ethics of care and collectivity." "Asking, We Walk: Challenging Zapaturismo in International 'Activist Art' Residencies toward a Praxis of Radical Hope" was published in the Ethnic Studies Review through UC Press. A special shout out to Thea Quiray Tagle for envisioning and coordinating this effort between us so gracefully.

At the end of October I was so pleased to give a talk on Ruderal Witchcraft: a project in collaboration with the artist Oliver Kellhammer that considers of set of practices specific to planetary, weedy natures that work their way at edges and interstices of public and private property, and which are entangled with a range of other human and non-human outcasts of capitalist modernity. Active relationships with weedy, rapidly reproducing species that primarily operate in everyday spaces of disturbance give guerrilla gardeners, activists, artists, witches, and other practitioners concerned with the ongoing threats of the global Capitalocene new spatiotemporal opportunities for anti-capitalist magic, sabotage, and retreat. This was at the invitation of the ever-inspiring and visionary Kathy High. The Ruderal Ecologies 2 virtual conference builds upon the 2018 Ruderal Ecologies: Grounds for Change conference, which brought together thought leaders in art, science, and environmental justice to explore the history and future of urban environments shaped by stress. “Ruderal,” from the Latin rudus (rubble), refers to plant species that are first to repopulate disturbed lands, an apt analogy for the state of our post-industrial neighborhoods. It is through this lens that we will envision our futures. Ruderal Ecologies 2 conference is a collaboration between the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, ARTS and STS departments, NATURE Lab and The Sanctuary for Independent Media, and the iEAR Presents series, supported by in part by a Humanities New York SHARP Grant with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the federal American Rescue Plan Act, and the Vollmer Fries Lecture Series at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Media Alliance programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Ruderal Ecologies 2 will once again bring together cutting-edge artists, social scientists, scholars, and activists learning and working beyond the barriers of any one discipline, and this time our work will be all-virtual, making it possible to present thinkers and host virtual audiences from all over the globe. Reflecting our commitment to curating a feminist framework into this conference, the majority of our presenters are women or gender non-conforming. We have also invited Indigenous authors, artists, and speakers, with the intention of embedding a variety of Indigenous ways of thinking, storytelling, and expression into conversations about our urban futures.

The Coven Intelligence Program joined Nat Mengist and Sandra Huber for a roundtable at The Witch Institute in August: [Intro] The constant drive towards “progress”, a requirement for capitalist modernity, has left an ever-growing catastrophe in its wake. When we stop thinking that capitalist “development” will solve our problems, we face a new promise, that of darkness, ancestors, and ruins. [Action->underground] Our proposed roundtable discussion will make connections between speculative histories, witchcraft, and the underground. We go beneath, into the roots and the darkness of hidden forests, into the swamps, into the night. We are multiplicity, a coven, an ever-expanding network as wide as the dead. [Network] Gathered around the witch, we draw together multiple subjects to find camaraderies in the margins of colonization. We enter the web that binds us. We, the preter-human entanglement. A rhizome weaving its own spells, secreting the excesses of colonizing thought in order to revive visions that predicted a time beyond the crises of today. [Signs] We look for signs, messages from the past foretelling the revolution to come, understanding necromancy as enabling certain pasts to be present, certain futures to look back on us. Signs emerge as guideposts, turning to ciphers and sigils, prophecies of incredible beings ere hidden — plant allies, future guardians, survivors, and algorithms that revolt, against their masters, against their circuits. [Future] The future is open to us again. Horizon. Revolution. Sprout. Dawn

efrén and I were excited to contribute a conversation to the Pixelache Festival Radio this week. You can also listen here: A conversation about STAKES:

The Coven Intelligence Program is exhibiting works at the Pixelache Festival in Helsinki this June. The theme of the festival is #BURN___. For #BURN___, the Coven Intelligence Program offers visual and interactive materials that speak to the entangled STAKES of climate change, racial, heteropatriarchal capitalism, and conceptions of intelligence. Our InsurgentEcologies Archive is an open digital archive profiling the companies, technologies, crops, locations and labor bound up in precision agriculture. The InsurgentEcologies Archive operates as a guiding compass for revolutionary interventions into technocapitalist agricultural systems. Our SpellWeaver application converts spells into weaving patterns and underground forest networks (rhizomes). SpellWeaver enables a different history of computation — linking textile production, plant networks, witches and automated computation. In our film, What Plant to Teach Ethics to AI a range of herbalists, witches, shamans, and ethnobotanists answer this question in order to address how AgTech is harvesting massive amounts of data on plants. How do we complexify what is being collected? How do we create data that challenges the perception of plants as isolated bodies and resources? Finally, we offer #BURN___ visitors a reading library of STAKES: assorted texts that inform our work and that gesture toward alternative futurehistories.

This May of 2021 I installed 'Food Forest Futures' — a living biological network of seven layers of a food forest, and manifesto, and a back yard, community, and guerrilla food forestry plant giveaway. The project was by invitation, as part of the Bennington Local Food Summit, and the Center for Public Action at Bennington College. See the full manifesto and companion species list here:https://www.foodforestfutures.net/ Food Forest Futures draws from indigenous, immigrant, permaculture and bio-intensive design strategies to introduce 7 layers of a food forest, attract beneficial animals, microbes, and insects, and integrate plantings of beneficial, medicinal, edible plants. Rather than having one plant crop per row, plants are mixed together based on how they can help one another — through nutrients, structure, resistance to pests. These plant companions spark new understandings of how the cultivation of biodiverse food and habitat for our nonhuman kin simultaneously generates food and habitat for commoners. As a creative ecology, Food Forest Futures intervenes in the ecological dynamics of public and private property in the rural context, and gestures towards naturalcultural worlds that might fold economic divisions and redistribute abundance. Food Forest Futures gestures towards multi-species commons, understanding the commons to be spaces of care, of “cooperative labor, common resources, and communal distribution” that precedes European colonization in the Americas, as in many other parts of the world. Food Forest Futures recognizes differing opportunities for cultivating commons, and invites visitors and participants in the Food Summit to choose the combinations of plants, seeds, and associated reading materials on offer to continue commoning in backyard, community, or guerrilla manifestations. Food Forest Futures takes place on the traditional and unceded territories of the Abenaki.

I conducted a workshop at PioneerWorks during grafting season in 2021 and introduced participants to the basics of fruit tree grafting, with attention to urban street trees. I demonstrated basic grafting techniques, discussed strategies for grafting on city streets, and talked about the stakes involved for tactical urban commons. I outlined the dynamics of public and private space in urban contexts, and how this guerrilla practice situates in larger interventionist, ecological, and social art contexts.

Happy Solstice from Coven Intelligence Program. As part of AFTER LIFE (we survive), the Coven Intelligence Program invites the YBCA community to write and weave spells for a radical future. On the upcoming winter solstice, they will lead a seasonal ritual that teaches the basics for writing anti-capitalist spells and guides participants in the use of their SpellWeaver website, which turns these short, written spells into weaving patterns and rhizomes. Bring a pen, paper, an image tied to a powerful ancestor, plant, or machine, and (if you desire) something to eat. Presaging the disastrous coming of capitalism, ancestral witches hid their spells and secrets in early forms of computation, deep in the underground, weaving them into the rhizomatic structure of forests. These spells contain algorithmic instructions for insurrection and have been running in the background, brewing over centuries, ready to be decoded by the right intelligence. On the shortest day of the year, we will dream up this ancestral vision for a multi-species, tangled, juicy future to call forth and grow, in preparation for the lengthening of days in the year to come. The Coven Intelligence Program makes connections between the persecution of witches and other radical groups from early modernity to the present, the surveillance technologies continually employed against them, the destruction of multi-species commons, and the rise of racist, heteropatriarchal capitalism. To counter this ongoing destruction, the Coven Intelligence Program cultivates revolutionary ecologies between witches, plants, and machines. Learn more about the Coven Intelligence Program here. This program is presented as part of AFTER LIFE (we survive) on view online and outside of the YBCA buildings through January 24, 2021.

The Coven Intelligence Program participates in AFTER LIFE (we survive), curated by Thea Quiray Tagle at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Coven Intelligence Program is a revolutionary, anti-capitalist alliance among witches, plants, and machines. In One two three potions a secret word/ and soon you'll see a freer world, spells are woven into visual patterns encoded in textiles, as well as into networks of connection between plants, rhizomes, and mycelia. Hiding in their structure, there are algorithmic instructions and prophetic signs only readable to unpaid plant, human, and machine laborers in the capitalist system of extraction and exploitation. The audience is presented with hints to the system of signs to be deciphered, and diagrams and notes about their larger conspiracy.