New York City is home to some of the most iconic green spaces in the world, from the great lawn in Central Park to the rolling meadows of Flushing-Corona. But if you found yourself on the northern edge of Prospect Park during the late spring and early summer of 2020 you may have noticed some changes to the manicured patchwork of traffic islands, tree pits, and greenspaces that surround one of Brooklyn’s largest urban parks. …
by Christopher Kennedy
In a time of pandemic crisis, how do we re-value what care means for all living beings?
There is a species of moss growing on the outside of my bedroom windowsill that I hadn’t noticed until recently. Two clumps of bryophyllum hiding in the shadow of a ventilation duct that extends to the roof of my apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
Known for their love of cool, moist and dark spaces, moss or byrophyte is a phylum of three kinds of non-vascular plants that use rhizoids instead of roots and reproduce using spores. …
Weedy Vegetal Agency, Radical Embodiment, and Ruderalism X Action(ism)
By andrea haenggi and Christopher Kennedy
In this essay, members of the artist collective the Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) share research from an embodied fieldwork [1] practice in collaboration with New York City’s ruderal [2] landscapes. This research draws primarily from past experiences at the EPA’s former headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a 1900 square foot urban “vacant” lot. We introduce the concept of the Emergent Plantocene as an alternative to the Anthropocene epoch, foregrounding the value and wisdom of urban spontaneous plants, otherwise known as weeds. …
Christopher Kennedy
Christopher Kennedy an artist-designer and educator. He is the assistant director at the Urban Systems Lab, The New School.
