WEED WALKABOUTS

ONGOING AND CONDUCTED IN COLLABORATION WITH ORGANIZATIONS SUCH AS MACHINALOCI AND PLACE IT!

The Weed Walkabouts are interpretive, data-collecting, and observation-based walks that seek to critically examine, study, and ultimately display the vast ecological diversity growing and living within the vacant lots and neglected spaces of contemporary cities. The Walkabouts are part of our ongoing Vacant Lands project, which posits that particular ecologies exist within cities that did not exist 100 years ago; they are the result of years of human intervention that have woven through and plowed over preexisting natural systems. Thus we have streets and sidewalks, and reflected heat and building-altered wind patterns; we have changing urban wildlife populations and imported plant species; and, of course, we have climate change. The Weed Walkabouts are particpatory, open-to-the-public, fact-finding missions in which we explore and document these new ecologies while in the process attuning ourselves to a kind of everyday nature that is all around and, as a result, spark our curiosity of the natural world and creative of ways of enhancing it.