Free Soil
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
Free Soil is an artistic collective founded by Amy Franceschini that focuses on creating environmental awareness and social change.
According to Free Soil:
Free Soil is an international hybrid collaboration of artists, activists, researchers and gardeners who take a participatory role in the transformation of our environment. Free Soil fosters discourse, develops projects and gives support for critical art practices that reflect and change the urban and natural environment. We believe art can be a catalyst for social awareness and positive change.
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Projects
Gardening Superfund Sites
Free Soil's Gardening Superfund Sites (2005) is an artistic research project designed to raise public awareness about superfund sites.
According to Future Farmer:
Gardending Superfund Sites is an art project which fosters discourse around the issues of nature preservation, industry, and activism. By providing information and facilitating activities with students and community groups we are making a call to action to high tech industries to take responsibility for their actions. This is a global issue that needs to be addressed locally!
An important component of the project includes the use of Soil Sampling Shoes which covertly collect soil samples from superfund sites in an effort to obtain information about the history and current status of the toxic clean up.
According to Worldchanging:
The shoes gather information in the form of soil information that can be pure evidence. This soil presented in the form of a sculpture becomes suspended evidence. The shoes become charged objects in the sense that the glass vials filled with soil become a representation of the memory of each site. A record of the waste produced in the making of computer memory in the early 1980s.
See also:
- Free Soil Bus Tour
- Future Farmer: Gardening Superfund Sites
- Worldchanging: Sampling from Superfund Sites
You Have the Right to Know
Free Soil's You Have the Right to Know is a consumer awareness project in which pieces of fruit are covered with wrappers containing information about alternative food systems and urban farming. The wrappers are designed to teach consumers about every phase of a product's life including how it influences the environment and ourselves.
According to Free Soil:
Free Soil has produced a run of FRUIT wrappers, a website, and a traveling installation as part of an initiative to inform people about alternative food systems and local food movements. The wrappers are disseminated throughout the food chain by piggybacking on oranges. Information will be carried through the food system and into the hands of consumers. The wrapper holds information on a variety of aspects concerning food movements, transport and urban farming. Get your daily dose!
See also:
- Free Soil: Projects: You Have the Right to Know
- F.R.U.I.T: Exploring your city and its connection to the world via fruit!
- F.R.U.I.T.: Right to Know: Wrappers
