Radicle Intervention

Think of a grass.

Blades iridescent in the sunlight, perhaps paling to purplish nodes, stems delicate yet strong, inconspicuous flowers clustered, silky, and heavy. The wind rises and the blades shimmer, the flowers lift.

Think of a grassland.

A thousand grasses and their cousins. Together they are waves of color, patches of texture rolling across the land. Their viridian color is brief, curing to pale yellows and ochres that possess somatic sound as wind moves across their backs. The sky above grows dark with summer monsoon rain; beneath the soil, the fibrous roots of the grasses mat together, holding the moisture as surely as they hold the soil.

The beauty of wild grasses is much more than aesthetic. Here in the Southwest, on the plains and mesas beneath the mountains, tight bunches of grasses intersperse with shrubs and occasional trees. Desert grasslands are hotter, drier, and sunnier than their taller eastern prairie relatives; their Gramineae co-creators are adapted to thrive in poor soils, endure extreme temperatures, and severe conditions of drought. This remarkable resiliency is made possible by their subterranean investment—the majority of a grass’s biomass grows underground in a dense mess of fine roots, enabling it to continue to grow even as its aboveground body is trampled, grazed, burned, and parched. For some species, seeds remain viable for at least seven years, ready to germinate when conditions are favorable, and duly in rhythm with the Southwest’s historical precipitation cycle of three to eight years. Even a withered or dormant grass may provide good nutrition for its symbionts. In arid landscapes like New Mexico, the grasses weave a vast matrix to support the cohabitation of hundreds of other species, if not the inhabitability of life itself.

Wild grasses are not impervious, however. We have fragmented, degraded, poisoned, and destroyed them in overzealous pursuits of agriculture and urban development. Those who remain, just as all Earth’s remaining life forms, are additionally jeopardized by climate change. Grasslands are the most ecologically threatened biomes in the world, but to restore a grassland is not to simply scatter seeds: it takes collaborative effort, more than we think, perhaps as long to restore as it did to destroy. It will take a collective cultural change—a shift in our way of living—to reframe our relationships and responsibilities to other species. We must reorient our attention and re-imagine our participation in the matrix of cohabitation. 

It is the community building, world-making pedagogy of the desert’s indigenous grasses that nurtures Radicle Intervention. Stencil images of central New Mexico’s native grasses, painted in a medium of local soil + native grass seed, are broadcast as temporary, pop-up murals in Albuquerque’s urban and historically grassy areas. Individual, sometimes solitary “grasses” grow from cracks and seams in pavement and concrete, along asphalt paths, sidewalk intersections, arroyo walls, and supporting infrastructures.

Human collaborators in Radicle Intervention include: children, adults, artists, non artists, friends, as well as curious passers-by who are invited to take up a paintbrush and add to the burgeoning grassland sprouting on the sidewalk or wall. The emergent murals reflect individual contributions and creative preferences, yet together, two, three, four “grasses” painted by different hands overlap and share space in assemblages greater than the sum of their parts. Rain, traffic and time wash away the images, freeing the seeds—agents of potential longevity—to find their ways to germination.

Radicle Intervention is a call to embolden ourselves as humans and non humans, as community members, to co-create spaces, no matter how temporary or indeterminate, where growth is possible. It is both proposition and action, individual and collective, ephemeral and durational, human and more-than-human. It is a gesture toward gentle planetary revolution.

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Allred, K. W. (2005) A Field Guide to the Grasses of New Mexico (3rd ed). New Mexico State University.

Blair, John, et al. (2014). Grassland Ecology. In Monson, R. K. (Ed.). Ecology and the Environment (pp. 389-423). Springer.

Pais, A. P. & Strauss, C. F. (2016) Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice. Valiz.