Graduation project
Transplanters
Freja Emilie Kræmmer Nielsen
An activist campaign facilitates spontaneous vegetation growth in urban areas as a way to challenge power dynamics between humans and plants.
Transplanters is a strategy for ecological diversity that assists the natural regeneration of endangered soil communities and conditions in order to facilitate spontaneous vegetation growth in urban green spaces. Based on research into Eindhoven and Gent’s ‘greening’ strategies, it shares the limitations of current urban development practices and their unintentional consequences—like biodiversity loss, and the insertion of unsuitable soil that hampers plant growth. Facing resistance from the city’s stakeholders led Freja Nielsen to develop strategies and activist approaches that share the contested histories of plants deemed ‘undesirable’, and assist the revival of self-regulating gardens. By encouraging plants to act as their own gardeners, Transplanters challenges the prevailing power dynamic between plants and humans.