Ruderal Witchcraft

Interventions, gestures, cultivations, and conjurings for creating coalitions between outcast of capitalist modernity.

Ruderal Witchcraft offers a theoretical framework and a set of practices specific to the planetary, weedy natures that emerge as a result of capitalogenic processes. The book is organized according to five categories of witchy, revolutionary action: love spells and invisibility magic in the margins; ‘biotarian’ timecraft; shapeshifting powers of hyperecologies and hyperorganisms; fugitive commoning; and the category of healing, remediation and danger. Drawing primarily from Marxist feminism, Marxist environmental history, science and technology studies, Situationism, as well as the authors’ own ecological interventions in the so-called United States, the authors propose that these actions, when conducted together, can expand the territory from which revolutionaries can renew themselves. Descriptions of how to work with ruderal plants and ruderal ecologies, plant monographs, spells, and other hands-on information that at times resembles a field book, a cultivation guide, or a grimoire round out the offerings in Ruderal Witchcraft.

Margaretha Haughwout and Oliver Kellhammer

Margaretha Haughwout works with humans, and the more-than-human, across technologies and ecologies, to cultivate a radical imagination that antagonizes proprietary regimes, colonial temporalities, and capitalist forms of labor. Haughwout’s work is exhibited nationally and internationally. She received her MFA from the University of California Santa Cruz, and holds certificates in permaculture and herbalism. She is Associate Professor of Art at Colgate University

Oliver Kellhammer is an ecological artist, educator, activist and writer. Through his botanical interventions and public art projects, he seeks to demonstrate nature’s surprising ability to recover from damage. He divides his time between his home in New York’s Alphabet City, where he is a part-time assistant professor in Sustainable Systems at Parsons, and rural British Columbia.