Guerrilla Grafters are excited about a new partner project, Trees of Tomorrow, in collaboration with Margaretha Haughwout, Cody Herrmann, and Julian Phillips, Social Practice Queens, and the John Bowne Agricultural High School. Initiated with Gregory Sholette and Randall Szott. True to form, it is a sprawling collaboration.

“Trees of Tomorrow is a guided, speculative tour of the trees of Flushing, Queens — exposing the ways trees shape, and are shaped by, neighborhoods, economies, and soils of Flushing; a complementary self-guided tour publication, echoing a futuristic theme, to be distributed with registration materials; and a speculative workstation where we collectively collapse the nature/society divide through specific cultural uses of a sampling of Flushing’s trees and tree grafting. Trees of Tomorrow asks how to empower new naturalcultural futures that enable local solidarity and survival across species.”

Guerrilla Grafters traveled to ISEA2017 in Manizales, Colombia this summer. Margaretha writes: “The Guerrilla Grafters have special resonance in cities where sterile trees line the streets, primarily sites of late capitalism, where historical natures are appropriated in such a way so as to constrain the co-production of viable resources both to humans and to plants and critters; where ornamentality is produced to support property. This kind of ornamentality supports the classist practice of looking, but not seeing, and certainly not engaging. It was unclear to me how much these practices resonated with my new Colombian friends, and what kinds of living, lived and yet-to-live alliances across difference must be made to support resistance to capitalism, or better yet, to co-produce multi-species alliances that topple it. It has always been Guerrilla Grafter’s aim to “undo capitalist civilization one branch at a time”; but of course these fertile branches loaded with viable pollen are meant to be one step in the introduction of new relationships and new life in the urban environment.” Read her whole post here.

The Spontaneous Interventions show continues to tour with recent venues in Chicago and New York City…. Photo by Nicolas Zurcher.