WE THE WEEDS was a series of collaborative, site-based, participatory projects focused on spontaneous urban plants (“weeds”) lead by artist/educator Kaitlin Pomerantz and artist/botanist Zya S. Levy from 2013-2017.
These projects positioned plants as highly intelligent itinerant storytellers and culture-bearers and aimed to dispel connotative markers like “blight” and “invasiveness” and dissolve distinctions between urban space and “nature”.
These projects took place primarily in Philadelphia at the dawn of a major building boom and document a bygone landscape of teeming ruderal ecologies (“vacant” lots that were never vacant at all) and a wave of pernicious development and displacement.