Konstantinos Doumpenidis

The Assembly of Plants - 2020

• On March 15, 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand, Brenton Tarrant commits mass killings of 51 immigrants in two mosques and injures 49 on live Facebook transmission. In his manifesto, he described himself as an "Eco-fascist" motivated to repel the waves of migrants fleeing climate change-ravaged regions of the world.


• On August 3, 2019, another mass murder takes place at a Latin American department !ore in El Paso, Texas. Patrick Crusius kills 22 and injures 24, referring to the responsibility that these peoples have for the climate change in their country.


The Assembly of Plants opens the debate on climate justice by directly linking it to the struggles of social movements that lack access to the centers of power.


In recent years, right-wing parties in Europe and elsewhere are abusing the issue of climate change and resource constraints to promote racist perceptions of a "clean land" -following the 3rd Reich's national slogan of Blood and Soil- excluding immigrants and creating social displacement. On the other hand, eco-fascists assimilate these far-right ideologies talking about the protection of the environment through national sovereignty, while committing mass murders against Immigrants during the last year.


The Assembly of Plants is open to every voice experiencing social exclusion.


We need our gardens to be without fences and walls. Urban gardening that will recreate the urban space. The cultivation of urban areas functions as a living space and a place for survival.


Radical gardeners, through their work, are part of a social struggle that brings in dialogue native or alien plants, human and non-human factors. They cultivate plants as a form of community and protest as a means to apply their ideas of utopia, coexistence, and environmental protection in the garden.


The Assembly of Plants aims to make social conflicts visible through actions and to highlight the root causes of the climate crisis - capitalism, extractivism, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and other systems of oppression.


www.konstantinosdoumpenidis.com




Konstantinos Doumpenidis (b. 1984, Xanthi, Greece) holds a Master’s in Digital Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts. His practice is multidisciplinary, stretching between photography, video art, publications and social experimentation. His work has been presented, among others, in the following group exhibitions: Government of Things, Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (2019);  L’ Autre Europe Avec Jean, in the context of the residency programme Emergency at Vevey, Switzerland (2018); Island, MEME Athens (2017); Medphoto Photography Festival (2017); 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015); PhotoBiennale Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (2014); By necessity, Athens Photo Festival (2013).

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