



The Urban Wilderness Action Center (UWAC) is a project initiated by Jon Cohrs, in collaboration with the Eyebeam Student Residents (New York), Stephanie Pereira, and UK-based artist Kai-Oi Jay Yung (UK). The UWAC project includes a web platform uwac.anewfuckingwilderness.com and a day of action where people from NYC, Berlin, and London will design and disseminate guerrilla gardening projects.
UWAC DAY is Saturday, March 20. Each of four lead cities will host a day of free artist-led interventions that respond to urban wilderness. We will document the day through a live Twitter, Flickr, and video feed streamed through the UWAC website.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Live video chat with all four sites: 3PM EST
Ongoing live Twitter feed from each project site at #UWAClive
1–6PM EST, NYC:
Join us at Eyebeam for a series of FREE and open to the public events:
2–6PM CET, Berlin:
Myriel Milicevic + Jon Cohrs are organizing the Berlin Micro-Turf Expedition. With a team of self-defined experts they will survey parking lot ecosystems, abandoned infrastructures, trade routes, and micro habitats of Berlin by dissecting the fringe-ecologies within the city. The expedition will report back live with its band of specialists who will setup up camp in several different areas in Berlin. Using a methodology that analyzes ecological succession the expedition will collect samples, map wildlife, illustrate the topography, detect seismographic data, and observe the micro-climates to create scientific models of future urban habitats.
3–6PM GMT, London:
Everbloom Pocket City Pollination: Kai-Oi Jay Yung Kai-Oi Jay Yung organises Everbloom Pocket City Pollination, a day of urban wilderness activity between 3-6pm, Saturday, March 20 across North and East London. Everbloom will unify rogue concrete cultivation experts and integrated social gardeners in synchronised urban wilderness activity across Harringay to Shoreditch. Private and public action will share skills and deploy guerrilla tactics across multiple sites and activities; from inner city housing, parking lot and religious grounds to council endorsed Memorial site. Actions involve a chance to share skills, meet fellow green belts or beginners and undertake some clandestine activity; from edible wild flower patchwork exchange, vegetable balcony advisory, pumpkin planting and mistreated yard clear up to a geo-map seed bombing walk.
There are two public urban wilderness events to get involved in on the day, with Tim Osborn at Furtherfield, and dispersal of the latest seed vegetable capsule technology in an exploratory walk across Shoreditch. This is a chance to join forces, bring some seeds and experiment in subversive gardening tactics to cultivate our forgotten, unlikely concrete settings for a healthier, self-regenerating city garden
Everbloom resists inertia of urban environment beyond risk of getting arrested and into walk to work. Yung serves cohesive mulch, pollinating communication between the loci events to generate and configure process, stimulating healing landscape.
Pocket City Pollinators include: Stoke Newington Transition Group, Friends Of Arnold Circus, The New Hanbury Project, Tim Osborn, Vanessa Harden and Sam Varney. Participants include: local residents, recovering addicts, university students and passers by.
9PM CET, Amsterdam:
Urban Wilderness Amsterdam: ElectroSmog goes Schijnheilig. Amsterdam, a city once known as a happening place, is suffering from the bureaucratic drive to over regulate. In the nineties, an abundance of underground initiatives marked Amsterdam as a home of spontaneity and experimentation. Squatted cultural centers lined the waterfront, free radio stations populated the air waves. Due to sparked up property prices and an ever growing political pressure to formalize everything and anything, Amsterdam underground culture has dissipated. Instead of the metropolis it claims to be, it has become the village we all know it to be. Where one has little chance of running into the unexpected.
As a necessary antidote, the closing event of the Amsterdam Electrosmog festival will take place in the squatted gallery Schijnheilig. There will be lectures on branding and public space, streamed guerilla gardening actions from around New York, London and Berlin, performances, ex-pirateers of radio 100 behind turntables, and much much more. Come along and play!