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| Guerrilla Grafters |
The “Guerilla Grafters” are a group of food freedom fighters started in 2012 in San Francisco who graft fruit-producing limbs onto sterile urban trees, specifically bred not to bear fruit. Their mission is to provide free, healthy food where it’s needed most – urban food deserts.
Typically, none of the trees in big cities produce nuts or fruit. City planners specifically select sterile varieties of many common fruit trees (apples, pears, plums, cherries) because of their beauty to decorate their streets. But they don’t want to be held liable for any potentially slippery messes fallen fruit could create on city sidewalks, or any animals it could attract (think bees, birds, squirrels).
The group’s founder Tara Hui tried using all the legal avenues to get the city to legalize fruit trees, but she realized that was getting her nowhere. She has since formed a group of dozens of stealth grafters in the San Francisco Bay Area, with thousands of followers on Facebook, many of whom have formed grafting groups in their own cities.
… 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….