Speculative Botany: Sensing the American Chestnut

A workshop and meal to meet the lost ‘American’ chestnut, Castanea dentata. Through a multisensory encounter with the species, we will propose a critical and speculative approach to local ecologies and multispecies solidarity.
Facilitated by ecological landscape designer Michael Cafiero and artist Adriana Gallo, this workshop and meal proposes a speculative reading of the botanical world. In this case, the functionally extinct Castanea dentata, or ‘American’ Chestnut. Once a keystone species across the eastern seaboard and stretching through Appalachia, the American chestnut population was decimated by a fungal blight in 1905.
The workshop will guide participants through these histories through a combination of spoken and embodied methods with chestnuts in different forms to smell, touch, and eat. We will begin with a talk tracing the botanical and cultural history of Castanea dentata and defining a speculative botany. We will then share a meal of chestnuts (not just American) and their companion species. Through a multisensory encounter with the species, we will propose a critical and speculative approach to ecology and multispecies solidarity.
Through plants and other botanical agents, we will critically wield an anthropogenic gaze to better understand and articulate how humans relate to and mold the botanical world and how it shapes humanity. We will propose and enact speculation as an ecological and relational method: charting histories and futures of species through a range of critical, sensory, and practical approaches. In doing so, we will ask what it means to relate to a species we have never met, might be lost, or may have been permanently changed and what other dimensions of that encounter and re-introduction exist and how to prepare for them.
Program
Talk and Discussion: Cafiero and Gallo will begin with a lecture on the American chestnut, weaving together the botanical, historical, and theoretical. A Q&A and discussion to follow.
Tasting: We will end with a meal featuring chestnuts and their companion species. The meal will be vegetarian and will contain dairy.
Facilitators

Adriana Gallo is an artist, theorist, and culinary practitioner based in New York. Her practice deals with ecologies of labor, metabolic sublimes, dialectics of conviviality, and speculative production through installation, sculpture, text, workshops, lectures, and meals. Gallo holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MA Art & Ecology from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Michael Cafiero is an ecological landscape designer passionate about connecting people, plants, place and soil. He designs ecologically diverse and climate-adaptive landscapes that work with plants to shape atmosphere and human experience. Michael holds a BA in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.