Designing with the Undesired: Giant Hogweed and Interspecies Futures
Published in Biotechnology Design, Cambridge University Press

Classification is a form of violence. Or at least, a form of forgetting. An extended abstract tracing how Heracleum mantegazzianum moves across scientific, regulatory, political, media and other cultural registers, and what biodesign can do when it refuses to take those axionatic categories as given.

Invasiveness isn't only in the biology of plant. It's also produced, at the intersection of colonial botany, border anxieties,land ownership shifts and administration of fear. In my extended abstract I ask what happens when design takes that production apart. Copper electroplating, field work, spatial intervention. Classification as design material.

Biodesign is an important shift, it allows for academic encounter, it becomes a critical framework blending visual art, field inquiry and speculative thinking together with rigorous scientific discourse.

Very grateful to my interlocutors: Prof. Petr Pyšek (Czech Academy of Sciences), Dr. Abigail Pérez Aguilera (The New School), Dr. Mark Spencer (formerly Kew Gardens, UK), Prof. Bernd Blossey (Cornell University), and Maja and Reuben Fowkes (UCL) for their generosity throughout.

Special thanks to Dr. Elisabeth Hénaff for making this project possible.
Developed with NEW INC.