Please see our proposal below:
The mural “Food Resilience in Urban Farming: How do YOU grow your food in the city?” will be painted at the beginning of the summer on a temporary wall located along the main path/ off the beaten path in the heart of Marcus Garvey Park.The image will represent layers of urban farming landscape at its various scales: a window sill, fire escape stair, roof, abandoned lot, etc. It will depict the range of possibilities New Yorkers can choose from to begin their farming journey, unraveling the visual richness of a polyculture landscape.
Once the mural is painted we propose to fully cover it with a grid of special recycled paper that is made of mulch and plant seeds, able to biodegrade as soon as it is planted. The little sheets of seed paper, as we call it, will be labeled “take me”, for the passerby and park dweller to come by and take home. As time passes, we hope with each piece of paper, the mystery mural will be revealed, showing aspects of the wonders of urban agriculture.
The interaction of distributing paper influences our audience twofold, revealing the didactic mural and allowing people to begin their own journey of growing food in a city with just a single seed.
With a hashtag participants can share on social media what grew from the seed paper, and where they decided to grow it. Will the newly cultivated plant be growing in a pot, a glass, an old wooden box or a tire? A resulting piece may include a collage of these images to add to the growing documentation of urban agriculture through art. As we are visual artists, we invite the jury to see the “Share any additional information” for a visualization of the mural proposal and opportunities for interaction.
