[ISEA2017] Artist Talk: Margaretha Haughwout — Conflict, Collapse and Care: Co-creating NatureCulture in the 21st-century

Artist Statement

My personal and collaborative practice operates at the intersections of technology and wilderness in the interest of imagining possibilities for human and ecological survival. I draw from legacies found in conceptual art, socially engaged art, and biological art to work across many media, complicating divisions between the technological and the natural. I understand practice to be the work of trying over time to make one’s engagements better, and survival to require flourishing multi-species cohabitation, mutuality and care. My ‘practice of survival’ engages with electrical and political power, interactive narratives, and cultivation of biological systems. I seek out horizontal projects that emphasize intersubjectivity and exist in a tension with totalizing viewpoints. Two of my active collaborations include the Coastal Reading Group — readers from different coasts who trouble the subjects of wilderness, speciation, humanness and ways of knowing — and the Guerrilla Grafters. The Guerrilla Grafters graft fruit bearing branches onto sterile, urban fruit trees. Hayes Valley Farm, active from 2010 to 2013, was an interim-use urban permaculture farm in downtown San Francisco, where we cultivated low input ecological systems and developed a unique lateral governance structure while still navigating complex hierarchical politics with city agencies.

  • Margaretha Haughwout, Guerrilla Grafters, USA. Assistant Professor of Digital Art, Colgate University, San Francisco/ Hamilton, NY, USA. I understand practice to be the work of trying over time to make one’s engagements better, and survival to require flourishing multi-species cohabitation, mutuality and care.My practice of survival works across many technical and natural media, often complicating the division between the technological and the natural, in the interest of mutuality and care. Experimentation both with electrical and political power, interactive narratives, and cultivation of biological systems are strategies that I use to this end. beforebefore.net