subRosa
Our second home on the WWW
At http://home.refugia.net, you’ll find a wealth of subRosa-related resources: free downloadable book chapters, articles from journals, web sites and pamphlets that accompanied our performances, and much more. We encourage teachers and scholars to freely duplicate any of subRosa’s materials for your classes and non-commercial research.
subRosa is deeply appreciative to the Creative Capital Foundation and the Catwalk residency program for support that made both web sites possible.
In 2002 SubRosa received a generous grant from the Creative Capital Foundation to develop a series of interrelated projects under the umbrella title REFUGIA-BAZ (Becoming Autonomous Zones). One such project was the establishment of a curatorial space and archive on the Internet reflective of the ideas first layed out in our Refugia: Manifesto for Becoming Autonomous Zones.
refugia: manifesto for becoming autunomous zones (BAZ)
“A place of relatively unaltered climate that is inhabited by plants and animals during a period of continental climate change (as a glaciation) and remains as a center of relict forms from which a new dispersion and speciation may take place after climatic readjustment.” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 1976)
Sections of agricultural fields planted with non-transgenic crops, alternating with transgenic crops. This is thought to limit the rate of resistance mutation caused in susceptible insect and weed species by gene transfer from GE mono-culture crops.
A Becoming Autonomous Zone (BAZ) of desirous mixings and recombinations; splicing female sexual liberation and autonomy with cyberfeminist skills, theory, embodiment, and political activism.
A critical space of liberated social becoming and intellectual life; a space liberated from capitalist Taylorized production; a space of unregulated, unmanaged time for creative exchange and play; experimental action and learning; desiring production, cooking, eating, and skill sharing.
A reproducible concept that can be adapted to various climates, economies, and geographical regions worldwide. Any useless space can be claimed as a refugium: suburban lawns, vacant urban lots, rooftops, the edges of agricultural lands, clear-cut zones in forests, appropriated sections of mono-culture fields; fallow land, weed lots, transitional land, battle-fields, office-buildings, squats, etc. Also currently existing Refugia such as multi-cultivar rice paddies, companion planted fields, organic farms, home vegetable gardens, etc.
A post-modern commons; a resistant biotech victory garden; a space of convivial tinkering; a commonwealth in which common law rules. Not a retreat, but a space resistant to mono-culture in all its social, environmental, libidinal, political, and genetic forms.
A habitat for new AMOs (Autonomously Modified Organism) and agit-crops; for example, “ProActiva,” an herb that is a grafting of witch-root, mandrake, and all-heal.
A place of asylum for the recuperation, regeneration and revitalization of useless GE crops that have been corrupted by capitalist viruses and agribusiness greed.
A place of imaginative inertia that slows down the engines of corporate agro/biotech and allows time to assess its risks and benefits through long-term testing.
Neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but a haunted space for reverse engineering, monstrous graftings, spontaneous generation, recombination, difference, poly-versity hybridization, wildlings, mutations, mongrelizing, crop circles, anomalies, useless beauty, coalitions, agit-crops, and unseemly sproutings. Biotech and transgenic work in Refugia will be based on desire, consensual public risk assessment, informed amateur experimentation, contestational politics, nourishment and taste value, non-proprietary expertise, convivial delight, and healing.
subRosa’s on-going cyberfeminist hothouse of strategies and tactical actions.