Excerpt from Grafting the Sterile Tree

written by Margaretha Haughwout

Full essay published in lunch 13: Mischief

“… Grafting is a skilled performative and skilled sculptural gesture to cut branches in a way that make more branches, to attach branches that make fruit and viable pollen, to engage in relationships that fold economic divisions and redistribute abundance. What we wish to show is that scarcity is a condition of capitalism, and our performance/ sculpture point to a way out, a very tiny step among many, of this condition, a condition that fundamentally relies on binaries of nature and culture, public and private. Guerrilla Grafters encourage looking at neighborhoods of more-than-human life in ways that generate resources rather than deplete them, from sunlight falling on rooftops, to coppiced ash for buildings and pathways that make for healthier trees, to deadheading plants like Hypericum perfolatum, a practice which makes more blossoms, for medicine. Guerrilla Grafters think that all artists (everyone) should make this kind of labor the center of their practice so that our earth, and our cities especially, are laboratories for survival….”