What histories take root in the plants growing through the city’s cracks?
Wild Hedges: Waste/lands is an exhibition by Al-Wah’at Collective, developed during their spring residency at Mediamatic. Through a five-meter textile installation, cyanotype prints, and a small publication, the exhibition asks how plants once moved, cultivated, and valued through colonial trade can later be renamed as invasive, unwanted, or waste.
“Today, many of these plants […] have become feral, found sprouting from the city’s cracks and verges, margins and hedgerows […] No longer useful to the state, they are criminalised in favour of so-called native species […] These stateless plants, uprooted for profit then discarded after centuries of exploitation, are the waste products of empire.”
— Ailo Ribas, from the exhibition accompanying publication Wild Hedges: Waste/lands
About the exhibition
Wild Hedges: Waste/lands brings together two connected parts: Wild Hedges, the collective’s long-term research into species labelled “invasive” and ecologies labelled “wastelands”, and Waste/lands, a site-specific continuation rooted in Amsterdam’s Oosterdok.
Wild Hedges is an ongoing research project by Al-Wah’at Collective examining the ecological and socio-political complexities of the prickly pear cactus and the cochineal insect across multiple geographies, communities, and temporalities.
The project questions anthropocentric and colonial approaches to species we regard as “invasive”. Through fibres, pigments, and food, Wild Hedges explores how material experimentation can cultivate practices of care within changing environments.
At Mediamatic, Waste/lands continues this research through the plants growing in the cracks of the Oosterdok: along canal docks, train tracks, verges, and abandoned plots. The Oosterdok is a site built on reclaimed land and shaped by histories of VOC trade, water management, and plant classification.
Here, so-called “invasive” species are not approached as targets for eradication, but as a wild hedge: entangled, adaptive growth rooting itself in disturbed soils amid a changing environment.
The exhibition includes a five-meter textile installation made with weeds collected locally around the Oosterdok, including sowthistle, narrow-leaved ragwort, nettle, cleaver, mallow, red valerian, cornflower, pansies, and nasturtium.
These plants were collectively eco-printed into the canvas, then overlaid with interlocking grids of embroidered darning: a historical, gendered Dutch practice of textile repair. Through the intersections between the plant prints and the embroidery, the installation considers how urban practices of maintenance and planning often overlook existing ecologies.
Alongside the textile work, a series of cyanotype prints developed by Gabriella Demczuk depicts the same plants, exposed in-situ with the shadows of ornamental plants growing nearby. Toned with the plants themselves, these weeds are brought into the production of the image, contesting isolated botanical drawings of plants such as those in the Moninckx Atlas, which functioned as part of the Dutch East India Company’s trade ledger.
The exhibition also includes a small publication by Ailo Ribas, tracing how so-called “invasive” species, artificial water/land boundaries, and urban ecologies are shaped by histories of colonial trade, classification, and control.
In conversation with Amsterdam’s Green City Vision for 2050, the exhibition challenges societal perceptions of so-called "invasive" species not as targets for eradication, but as a “wild hedge”: entangled, adaptive growth rooting in disturbed soils amid a changing environment. Wild Hedges: Waste/lands showcases systems of classification continue to shape urban landscapes and the lives of more-than-human communities.
Formed by Ailo Ribas, Gabriella Demczuk, and Areej Ashhab in 2022, Al-Wah’at is an artist-research collective committed to growing communal practices of care and repair in ecologies labelled “wastelands”. Their work seeks to counter colonial and anthropocentric narratives around arid lands and invasive species by engaging with a diversity of knowledge - be they local, folk, scientific, or more-than-human - to promote a deeper understanding of these ecologies, especially in light of climate change.
