Workshop & Umzug: Wild Garden Utopia

15:00
WORKSHOP
Wild Garden Utopia

Japanese knotweed is a plant faceing genocide and torture in Europe, meanwhile the media covering the case in a xenophobic overtone. We want to invite you to dig deeper into this fable-like story.
In the workshop we want to discuss this ethical dilemma involving a species so alien to us not many of us can feel empathy for it. After we become more involved we can use Japanese knotweed (collected from sites where the plant is being eradicated) to promote our message.

The language of the workshop will be English.
Duration: 3 hours

After the workshop we will go to the streets with this march:

18:00
MARCH
Wild Garden Utopia

Join us to make a funeral to a plant that was killed as a straw person for our better climate conscience.

In this march, or procession we want to introduce you to the fable of the Japanese knotweed. Almost two centuries ago a tiny stem of a female plant was brought to Europe from Asia. Despite the plant can’t spread without a male, just with its roots, now it is covering huge arias. How did it happen? It was planted everywhere as a fashionable garden plant, and later accidentally (for example with huge mowers along roads and channels). In some cases, it causes damage to infrastructure, and overgrows native plants. In the coverage of the story the plant was personified as an invader, an emigrant, a terrorist, a monster, a giant female. And an annihilation of the plant was started, with poison and electrification. For the most colonies it means a decade long torture.

We see this plant story as an obvious case of sifting the blame of the human-made environmental crisis. And a truly horrifying example what could happen if a living being don’t have inalienable rights, or in this case any rights at all.

We will march with a Japanese knotweed figure, made from killed plants, and we will escort it with flutes, percussion, and signs, made out of the plant.
And in the end, we will burn it.

If you have time, come also for the workshop before the march.

Wild Garden Utopia
Im Rahmen von before it gets better …