Embroidered Botanic Folksonomy

On Saturday I went to an event called The Gendered City which involved several artists running participatory events in the park. I took part in a masked ball dance, a light therapy session to protect against winter depression, and helped Amy Franceschini stitch local plants onto people's clothing (see my approximation of the Field Horsetail above).

Amy’s project Nearest Nature involved running a workshop with botanists and other participants to explore the local flora, they collected plants and renamed them with their own taxonomy. The results are on display at the Bildmuseet. Amy is also part of Future Farmers in San Francisco, so of course the work plays out a botanic folksonomy, mimicking the social taxonomies of meta-data tagging, and the resulting democratic poetry and confusion. For an introduction to the concept of folksonomy – see my essay on the NoFixedAbode website.