Associate Professor Margaretha Haughwout
IAS Summit: Witchcraft as More-than-Human Ontology and Decolonial Practice
Colgate University
Margaretha Haughwout cultivates distributed, tactical approaches to the interconnected issues of our time/s. She works across technologies and ecologies, to instigate a collective, radical imagination that antagonizes proprietary regimes and the eco-social relations driven by the commodity form. This work manifests as intervention, fabulation, collectivity, through distributable materials, living installation, participatory event, and as experimental pedagogy.
Margaretha's active collaborations include the Coven Intelligence Program, with efrén cruz cortés — a coven that uncovers revolutionary ecologies of work between witches, plants, and machines; the Guerrilla Grafters, who graft fruit-bearing branches onto ornamental street trees to reclaim the urban commons; and Ruderal Witchcraft, with Oliver Kellhammer, a set of eco-interventionist practices rooted in the weedy natures that push at the edges of private property.
Her independent projects include the Food Forest Studio in Central New York, which serves as a base for ongoing practice, and the biannual Grafters X Change, which gathers bioregional eco-artists and fruit tree enthusiasts to advance tactical food forestry. Recent permanent, living installations include Food Forest Futures in North Bennington, Vermont, and DE-FENCE, part of the Sanctuary for Independent Media's Eco-Art Trail in Troy, NY.
During their IAS Fellowship Associate Professor Haughwout will be collaborating with Dr Anais Carlton-Parada from the Institute for Creative Futures and Dr Rachael Grew from the School of Social Sciences and Humanities.