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Urban Ecology Workshops at CIVIC SPACE with Sam Lefort

We’re really excited to announce our first Artist-in-Residence at CIVIC SPACE, Samantha Lefort with the Urban Ecology Project! Evolved from a love of design, urban environments, and creative projects – The Urban Ecology Project is the interjection of ecology and new life into an urban space. It kicks off on Tuesday, July 24 for a week of workshops.

Urban Apiaries, Tuesday July 24 @ 3pm 
BEES AND YOU, IN THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

Did you know 1 in every 3 bites of food are thanks to the pollination of bees? It’s true! Come and explore bee culture and honey culture in the urban landscape. Taste some honey and make a wild bee hive!

Urban Container, Tuesday July 24 @ 7pm  
Gardening 101 GET DIRTY.
Add some edibles to your landscape! One of the best and most efficient gardening methods, container gardening is great for any space!

Cycling Charette, Wednesday July 25 @ 7pm
A-ROUND ABOUT
In traditional design charette style, participants will be presented with an opportunity in the local community to see new possibilities and spark an invigoration of underutilized space – via bicycle. Exploring urban place by bicycle – acting as flaneur about the city, noticing, seeing, creating an urban narrative for NEW possibilities in the spaces we seldom see.

Moss Graffiti, Thursday July 26 @ 7pm
GET IT GROWIN’ ON
Learn how to make unique and intricate moss graffiti to add a little green to your City! All natural and chemical free, these beautiful living art pieces thrive on their own after application.All workshops are ALL AGES and FREE!! Any questions? Let us know.

SPACE IS LIMITED, please contact us to register in advance!

Here’s the entire set of lovely posters Samantha designed!

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Tactical Gardening Workshop in Guelph

Danielle, Rosina, Michelle, and I were up in Guelph over the weekend as part of the Kazoo festival, leading a workshop on making those magnetic planters we were working on last summer .

The workshop was a lot of fun and I thought I’d post a few photos of some of the more abitious designs and fun installations of the planters in downtown Guelph. The “lookin’ good” planter above didn’t last more than five minutes — when we returned to where we put it, it was already gone.

Another planter hiding in a kind of forgotten garden. Taking a quick walk around the neighbourhood surrounding Ed Video (where we had the workshop), and putting up these planters was a lot of fun — we need to find some more time for pedestrian scale exploration in Windsor again.

Another planter  with an ambitious design on the parking meter. Thanks for having us, Kazoo, and thanks for coming out to play with us, Guelph! Making these is a lot of fun, so easy, and we still have some that survived from last summer. Maybe doing another workshop at some point is in order…

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Vanessa Harden: the Subversive Gardening

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Canadian-born / UK-based designer, Vanessa Harden has invented a number of camouflaged devices meant to ease the process of guerrilla gardening.

Among things like ankle-attached mechanical seed distribution, briefcases that dig holes, and purses designed to easily carry plants to the site of installation, Harden hacked a Pentax camera to create what she calls, the Precision Bombing Device 1, pictured above.

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Futurefarmers: Cultivating Consciousness Since 1995

Futurefarmers

Amy Franceschini of San Francisco, is a contemporary American artist and designer who’s practices span from drawing, painting, sculpture, design, net art, public art and gardening. She teaches media theory and practice courses at both Stanford University and San Francisco Art Institute.

In 1995, she founded Futurefarmers as a way to bring together multidisciplinary art practitioners to bring together new work. They are, “teachers, researchers, designers, gardeners, scientists, engineers, illustrators, people who know how to sew, pattern makers, cooks and bus drivers with a common interest in creating work that challenge current social, political and economic systems.” Amy Franceschini explains, “The name [Futurefarmers] is a product of my childhood,” explaining the influences of her father, a corporate farmer and owner of a pesticide company, and her mother, a New Age type devoted to the notion of organic farming.

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Victory Gardens

Victory Gardens, a community art project that encourages people to grow their own food

Victory Gardens is a new project by Amy Franceschini. The project recalls the WWII victory gardens project that encouraged citizens to grow their own food as a tactic to keep them calm over the war and support their troops. Franceschini, the daughter of an organic farmer and an industrial farmer, takes the project back to where it began—in front of the city hall buidling in San Fransisco, where they planted a large garden and since introduced a pilot project to disseminate the skills and tools needed to do urban-scale gardening across 15 households throughout San Fransisco.

There’s also a write-up on the SF Victory Gardens 2007 project in the previously mentioned JoAP.

I know FedUp is working really hard in this city, and that Tom Lucier proposed planting a garden for the downtown mission, and that Scaledown once (maybe) suggested the old Greyhound station downtown is turned into some kind of market, and that there’s rumours of a symposium surrounding urban activism that may discuss some of these very things… so (since this is what BCL does) I have to suggest that we move forward with the planning for a large-scale urban/community gardening plan, something like turning 10% of the riverfront into a community garden (maybe on the slopes that lead up to University Ave). Anyone interested?

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