Rachel Frank: Rewilding Lecture on Swale tomorrow evening, Tuesday September 20th
September 20, 2016, 6:00 pm on Swale at Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 6
Artist Rachel Frank will discuss her research, sculptures, and performances as they relate to the environmental practice of Rewilding. Earlier this year, as an artist-in-residence at the Innoko National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, Frank traveled down the Yukon and Innoko Rivers, gaining rare access to protected areas and visiting indigenous peoples to discuss the 2015 reintroduction of a population of Wood Bison, which marked the first time in over a century this species has lived in the United States. Frank will contextualize her experiences within the broader historical importance of the American Bison and its role in our ecosystem as a keystone species. Her talk will also feature one of her sculpted bison head masks and images related to Rewilding.
Rachel Frank uses sculpture, theater, and performance to explore the tensions between the natural world and the manmade, the animal and the political, the past and the present. Her performance pieces have been shown at HERE, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Select Fair, and the Bushwick Starr in New York City, as well as The Marran Theater at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
More information can be found at: http://www.rachelfrank.com
RSVP for Kim Darling Drawing Workshop on Swale
Swale opens Saturday September 17th at Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 6
Swale will open at 11am at Brooklyn Bridge Park.
At 2pm artist Alyssa Dennis will present her work. She founded Common Knowledge to promote botanical education via a visual vocabulary accessed through interactive learning and everyday objects. These objects provide a cultural platform for sharing information about our natural environment while advocating for human health and an active awareness of our surroundings; where plant knowledge can again become Common Knowledge.
Alyssa will informally present a few prototype products of Common Knowledge at Swale Sept 17th. For example, Urban Herbal is a coloring and activity book that has been developed to engage adults and children alike in the imagery of wild edible medicinal plants that flourish abundantly in every city in the Northeastern United States.
Gearing up for Full Moon Yoga with Malik Wilson at Brooklyn Bridge Park on September 18th at 8:30pm!
Donation-based class at and near Swale on Pier 6, BBP
Public Food: A Science of the Living City Panel aboard Swale Tuesday October 4 at 6pm
Tue, Oct 4 at 6:00 PM, Brooklyn, NY
Public Food: A Science of the Living City Panel aboard Swale
What if healthy, fresh food could be a public good? Community gardening has deep roots in many New York City neighborhoods, while new forms of urban farming – including entrepreneurial models, rooftop farms, controlled environment agriculture – are also emerging and proliferating. Activists define food justice as access to healthy, fresh, affordable, and culturally appropriate food. Some argue that food justice is a right. Swale, a collaborative floating food project, is dedicated to rethinking New York City’s connection to our needs for sustenance. Built on a 130-foot by 40-foot floating platform, Swale contains an edible forest garden. Functioning as both a sculpture and a tool, Swale provides free healthy food at the intersection of public art and service. With Swale, the creators want to reinforce water as a commons, and work towards fresh food as a commons too. Please join us in a conversation with community practitioners, city managers, and researchers about growing, foraging, and harvesting public food in public spaces.
On The Panel:
Marla Emery-US Forest Service | Lindsay K Campbell – US Forest Service | Brittany Quale- GreenThumb | Ray Figueroa- NYC Community Garden Coalition
Additional Details:
Swale is docked at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 6 at the Northeast Corner. Doors will be open at 5:30pm the panel discussion will begin promptly at 6:00pm.
When Tuesday, October 4, 2016 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM (EDT) – Add to Calendar Where Brooklyn Bridge Park – Pier 6 – Near Brooklyn Bridge Park Greenway, Brooklyn, NY 11201 – View Map Tags Things to do in Brooklyn, NY Seminar Food & Drink
NYC Urban Field Station
Organizer of Public Food: A Science of the Living City Panel aboard Swale
The New York City Urban Field Station‘s mission is to improve quality of life in urban areas by conducting and supporting research about social-ecological systems and natural resource management. It began as a partnership between the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, and now also includes the Natural Areas Conservancy.
An Open Invitation: Public Food Working Group
With the help of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, we are organizing a space to generate ideas about how to expand our public urban commons. We see this group involving asset mapping and field research that examines current trends in the city’s public land use, working towards outlining a path towards proposing possible alternative strategies to support the struggle for food security in New York City. We will use advocacy resources to begin modeling a maintenance plan for NYC’s public urban land that can protect and regenerate these spaces, as well as invoke additional uses for them. We plan to have this working group culminate in the crafting of a petition and pamphlet, and hope to bring folks to this group who have interest in participating in conversations with or work as part of organizations that oversee public land, health and wellness and urban food security in the 5 boroughs.
Our meetings will be bi-weekly and roving. We hope to meet from September – November and have a culminating document that we produce and print around December.
Our first meeting will take place on Monday September 12th at 6PM in the garden at Pioneer Works, which is located at 159 Pioneer Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn. (Directions here)
We are interested in meeting in different locations, and can decide together where our next meeting will take place after our first gathering. Some optional spaces we can convene in are at Pioneer Works & onboard Swale, which will be moving between Governor’s Island, Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Brooklyn Army Terminal throughout the fall. Monday & Tuesday evenings tend work well for us, but what about you?
Looking up, looking forward,
Mary Mattingly & Marisa Prefer
Freshkills Park: Swale at Governor’s Island
On Board Swale, A Floating Food Forest
Written by Savannah Lust, Freshkills Park Development Intern.
Bok choy and mint are ripe for the picking aboard Swale, Mary Mattingly’s floating food forest project that is docked at Yankee Pier on Governor’s Island until September 15th.
Mary Mattingly is a New York City based visual artist who proclaims in her Manifesto that “art and utopian thought” are capable of cultivating “systematic social change.” Mattingly locates her work in the impugning of “predominant ideologies,” particularly systems of exchange and waste production. To challenge these ideologies, Mattingly creates self-sustaining “sculptural ecosystems in urban space” that work to replace the dominant structures with “flexible and inclusive schemes for living that encompass respect, non-hierarchy, nonviolence, and tolerance.” These new ways of living can be seen in her past projects, such as WetLand (2014), Triple Island (2013), and Flock House Project (2012).
Swale, Mattingly’s newest project, began with an “almost utopian” question, as she tells Tech Insider: “What if healthy, fresh food could be a free public service and not just an expensive commodity?” Built from reclaimed shipping containers from the Port of NY and NJ, Swale is a 130 by 40 ft barge that houses “an edible living system.” Annuals and perennials such as gooseberries, lemon balm, yams, and strawberries co-habitat the garden beds and are irrigated by a mix of rain and river water, filtered on board. Collaborating with community groups, students, artists, and the US Coast Guard to bring Swale to life, the project opened to the public in July at Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx. This month, Swale will be docked at Governor’s Island and will eventually move to Brooklyn Bridge Park in September. Visitors are welcome aboard to pick, for free, their own food, reversing the notion that food is a commodity rather than a public service.
The sky was heavy when I visited Swale, threatening an eventual rain. Someone remarked that being aboard Swale felt akin to being on an isolated island, as Swale’s infrastructure partially shielded New York City’s skyline. Yet, the barge rocked back and forth on waves produced by passing ferries, a constant reminder that we were, indeed, on the water. Seemingly melodic fog horns threaded in and out, providing a soundtrack to our visit. Rita, a collaborator onboard Swale, stood near a banana plant with its large tropical waxy leaves bobbing in the breeze, and showed how to propagate roots on a freshly cut sprig of rosemary. A sign encouraged visitors to bring a plant when visiting, sharing in Swale’s interdependent and co-created story.
Swale is an exercise in the merging of art and public service, charting the territory of social sculpture and thought experiment. Mattingly writes on Swale’s website that:
“By continuing to create and explore new ways of living, we hope that Swale will strengthen our ways of collaborating, of cooperating, and of supporting one another. At its heart, Swale is a call to action. It asks us to reconsider our food systems, to confirm our belief in food as a human right, and to pave pathways to create public food in public space.”
In the creation of Swale, Mattingly directs her questioning towards the globalization of the food industry. We depend, she writes, on “large-scale supply chains with little accountability” for our food. The long, often obscured, chain from the farm to table is destructive to our plant and to our bodies, decreasing biodiversity and increasing food scarcity. Swale imagines an intervention in this exhaustive and wasteful supply chain by creating a space for community based economy.
As Mattingly tells Hyperallergic, Swale is an “experimental zone… [in which the participants act in ways that] can be both interdependent and autonomous.” This experimental zone in which Swale exists in is additionally creating an access point to New York City’s largest common space—the waterways. The choice of building a floating food forest instead of a more traditional land-based project evades the ordinance that forbids the foraging or growing of plants for food on the city’s public land. As Swale takes to the open water, it functions in an in-between zone. Operating within the urban and legal infrastructure of NYC, Swale imagines another answer, another way, finding a loophole where there was none.
A white pavilion has been erected on Swale, designed by Terri Chiao and Adam Frezza in collaboration with Biome Arts. The pavilion, named the Greenhouse Theater, will serve as a gallery and a space for meetings and performances during Biome Art’s Eco_Hack 2016, which will begin its programming during Swale’s stay in Brooklyn. Biome Arts has set up monitors onboard Swale to collect data such as soil acidity and air temperature. The collected data will be turned into semi-abstract digital visualizations that will be re-broadcasted back onto the forest to create a “digital forest.”
It is Mattingly’s belief that art, her definition of which is complicit with utopian thought—thought that stretches the boundaries of what is acceptable, generates new worlds, further creating potential for new rules and governing systems. Existing as both real and utopian, perhaps like a Foucauldian heterotopia, Swale is a place which inverts what is established and frames a way to see outside of the everyday. Like the work that is being done at Freshkills Park, Mattingly reimagines what can happen, and what is expected to happen, in a given space. These projects allow us to reclaim the utopian nature of place making for ourselves and for our community.
Find out more information about Swale here.
For Swale’s location and open hours, check out the calendar.
Yucca Leek Lentil Soup Recipe
2 wild leek stalks
1 yucca root (cubed)
2 sprigs of rosemary
1 sprig of thyme
3 cloves of garlic
2 cups of green lentils
1 head of maitake mushroom
2 fresh bay leaves
5 cups of purified water (add more or less depending on preference)
Seasoning (sea salt, dash of cayenne pepper, garlic salt, cumin, olive oil) to taste
To Cook in Crock Pot : coat pot with olive oil, add 2 cloves of garlic and leeks in pot. Allow to simmer on low for 30 minutes. Add yucca, lentils, bay, leaves, herbs, mushrooms, seasoning and water. Simmer on low for 4 hours. Add last clove of garlic and a few rosemary leaves for extra flavor. Let simmer another hour until lentils and yucca become tender. Enjoy!
For added nutrition, add 2 cups of Kale after 3-4 hours of simmering. This soup makes a hearty meal; perfect for a fall evening.
Callen Zimmerman: Swale Dye Lab – plants, color, fiber
- WHEN
- Saturday, September 10, 2016 from 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM (EDT)
- WHERE
- Swale – Pier 6 – Governors Island, New York, NY – View Map
Callen Zimmerman is a designer, researcher and educator based out of Brooklyn, New York. Callen currently works with the Textile Arts Center as the Director of the Manhattan Summer Program and Textiles for Teens Instructor, and has had the incredible fortune of studying and teaching at textile houses and institutes in France, Cambodia, Thailand, Morocco, Canada and southern India. Callen co-runs the collaborative roving design collective non/studio, and is currently conducting textile research as a student in the Graduate Center at CUNY.
News about Swale 