DE-FENCE, installed in 2023, is a living participatory artwork by Margaretha Haughwout sited in the NATURE Lab yard. It was realized across a series of workshops and community engagements in 2023 and 2024. Scroll down for documentation.
DE-FENCE is a living installation and a series of community events at NATURE Lab under the umbrella of the Sanctuary’s growing Eco-Art Trail. The living installation is built in relationship to NATURE Lab’s back fence and the other emerging food forest networks and sign systems in the newly inaugurated space. DE-FENCE is an offering of perennial medicinal plants that support the immune system of humans while also enabling mutual support of the plants themselves and their critter companions through nutrient, structure, and insect attraction/ repulsion. The planting design and labeling system emerges out of community conversations and observation processes with the artist. DE-FENCE conflates collective health with territorial defense in opposition to medical and legal conceptions of immunity that derive from notions of private property. Hear the artist talk about her work and the project for the Hudson Mohawk Magazine and the Eco-Art Trail: Margaretha’s interviews.






Below, documentation of DE-FENCE in Spring 2024 as woad, a dye plant and medicinal adapted to disturbed habitats, comes into bloom alongside stinging nettles and dandelion.




For part 2 of DE-FENCE, participants helped install deconstructed fence posts (specially carved with designs that emerge from ongoing community drawing exercises), and plant medicinal seeds and seedlings from the artist’s Food Forest Studio. Participants continued to engage with already existing medicinal plants growing in the marginal spaces and edge conditions of the neighborhood, discussed neighborhood environmental health conditions, and the ways that marginal medicinal plants can participate in the bioremediation and protection of the ecosocial communities around NATURE Lab. “The Line Becomes a Territory” is the header from a section in a forthcoming book entitled Ruderal Witchcraft by Margaretha, co-written with Oliver Kellhammer, and explores the ways that communities who want to resist the forces of capitalist accumulation can find power in, occupy, and expand the boundaries, edge zones and fence-lines established by regimes of private property.






Margaretha Haughwout works with humans, and the more-than-human, across technologies and ecologies, to cultivate a radical imagination that challenges proprietary regimes, colonial temporalities, and capitalist forms of labor. Her work manifests as speculative fabulation, intervention, participatory event, walking tour, experimental pedagogy, installation, and biological processes. Haughwout’s active collaborations include the Coven Intelligence Program, with efrén cruz cortés, the Guerrilla Grafters, and Ruderal Witchcraft with Oliver Kellhammer. She created and maintains the Food Forest Studio in Central New York.
Haughwout’s personal and collaborative artwork is exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently, at Stadwerkstatt in Linz, Austria, the Pixelache Festival in Helsinki, Finland, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California, and at Bennington College in Benington, Vermont. Haughwout received her MFA from the University of California Santa Cruz. She is Associate Professor of Emerging Media at Colgate University.

This project and associated events were made possible through support of the iEAR Presents series with support from RPI’s ARTS department and School of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, and from the New York State Council for the Arts/ NYSCA, with The Sanctuary for Independent Media, and from NEA Our Town “Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail” creative placemaking grant.Co-sponsored by NATURE Lab and People’s Health Sanctuary.

