Green Urban Hacking

“Canada. Living the American dream without the violence since 1867” said the t-shirt of a guy I met once.  From the peaceful Canada comes a peaceful urban guerrilla. I’m talking about three young artists from Toronto who want to revalue the neglected areas of their cities through their work.

Image taken from bladediary.com

The first one is known as Posterchild and creates public installations thought to interact with their sourroundings. Planter boxes made of wood and full of flowers are hanged up on lampposts, walls or traffic lights, while empty flyer-boxes are transformed into unusual containers for any kind of plant. Posterchild creates his works with the flotsam of the urban environment, he just processes it and return it to the city. The uselessness of these objects could be an opportunity, for artists and people, to act and dialogue whit the metropolitan contest, where the green is often absent.

Image taken from posterpocketplants.blogspot.com

However, the most original idea is the Poster Pocket Plant project, a work of two other artists who find the way to bring a bit of nature in our everyday city life: Sean and Eric create some “hacking” installations with the typical urban furniture: they tear pieces of billboards and roll them up in order to create a sort of a pot where to put some soil and plant flowers. In this way, they want to show people the enormous potential of public space and teach them to look at reality  from a different point of view.

Poster Pocket Plant Instructions – Courtesy of the artist

Both projects fall within the category of “DIY urban design”, as Scott Burnham describes all kinds of artworks born outside the official panorama of contemporary art, a new fresh underground culture which starts to emerge in our city.