A silkscreen poster designed in collaboration with Christopher Lee Kennedy for the exhibition Environmental Empathies at the Callahan Center Art Gallery at St. Francis College.

On every continent and in every bioregion, weedy species find a way to survive. Their resilience is at once inspiring while also threatening to many, bringing to fore a complex set of questions about migration, climate change, and the interconnectedness of multispecies life in a time of extinction.

As both a performative gesture and call to action, these prints draw inspiration from the texts of poet Dinos Christianopoulos and recent activist movements in Central America. Over the past several years, the phrase “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds” has been popularized in the midst of discriminatory immigration “reform”, with its origins in a couplet appearing in Christianopoulos’ 1978 book, The Body and the Wormwood:

what didn’t you do to bury me

but you forgot that I was a seed

Designed to be wheat pasted in the streets of NYC, this project evolves these entangled texts within the context of ruderal urban landscapes and the work of the artist collective the Environmental Performance Agency. At the EPA we draw inspiration from the wisdom of spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds), and intend these posters to encourage further acts of resistance that take a cue from the ingenuity of wild urban plants and interspecies collaboration.

(above text by Christopher Lee Kennedy)