Seven Phytocrip Afternoons

SEVEN PHYTOCRIP AFTERNOONS is a slow study group that continues our mingling during the 2024-2025 Dormancy, Reseeding, Resistance initiated by Anastasia (A) Alevtin, a theorist and artist whose work examines fleeting and stubborn practices of non-apparent ordinary subversion improvised against disabling Western bodily normativities in queercrip and migrant lives. In doing-in-common with Light-harvesting Complex (Vantaa, Finland), Glasgow Seed Coop (Scotland), and the remote body funded by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland and Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the project centred on communal gardening and seed-saving practices that emerge in the inflamed intersections of anti-ableist politics and food insecurity lived by economically precarious, migrant and disabled people. The project brought together the wisdoms and wits of gardeners, seedsaver, artists, writers, and microbiologists, with seeds, plants, and the many subversive phytocrip dormancies.

Coined by Em Merrin May Armstrong over a slow backyard walk with (A) at Tuo Tuo Arts, the notion of phytocrip condensed the spirit of the gatherings.

Phytocrip (verb) to mobilise mutual and mutational experiences of human and plant bodies under the disabling—exploitative, extractivist, and eugenic—conditions of life and facilitate shared resistance; to nurture the resilient hybridity of crip experiences through vegetal realities.

[...]

The phytocrip is me, who exists as a congestive and retentive body folding into and onto itself.

The phytocrip is a cleaver (Galium aparine) that has long been used to support lymphatic systems and reduce swelling. Cleavers grow as impossible contortions, not dissimilar to my swollen crip bodyscape. It’s a plant both so enigmatic and present that it claims a hundred names

…goosegrass, sticky willy, robin-run-the-hedge, sweetheart, bedstraw…

and is carried with a thousand hooks on the skin of millions of bodies. We are the phytocrip—kin bending and flexing in an unpredictable and unwanted manner—ubiquitous and vital, but shunned as noxious, invasive, unruly, unsightly,

as Em wrote in “Phytocrip, a nomenclature” (2025), a collective publication designed by Paola Jalili with delicious stamps by Linnea Lindgren and published by Ei, Mainoksia, Kiitos! to which you can listen to right here.

This year, we will continue to chew on (mutual) phytocrip knowing-living across seven afternoons hosted by (A) and generously facilitated by Char Heather, Em Armstrong, Rowan Lear, Joss Allen, Viktoriya (Vita) Kuzina, and, and, and, with Yvonne Billimore, Viki Kontopoulou and Death By Landscape landing their voices and tunes to story more of phytocrip wisdoms. From July to December 2026, we will gather around hooks, parachutes, access thievery, activist affordances, stickiness and slime, fermentation, generative friction, whispering to plants, and our (changeful) mutual needs for light and shadows. Focusing on crip and queer perspectives, we will story our mutual phytocrip living as mischievous, cranky, and rebellious.

Our gatherings will take the form of reading sessions, writing workshops, guest talks, and seed-saving for our windowsill gardens. When deep into the winter, we will make a sweet snail mail printed matter (because who doesn’t love a flop-flap of an envelope arriving in a letterbox around Christmass?).

Before we meet on the wwwebs, the study group will preface with these tomatoes are so green, i need to write it down in burgundy ink. This reading and sound performance by Anastasia (A) Alevtin, Yvonne Billimore with Death by Landscape will take place on June 24th, at 18:30 - 19:30 EEST on the island of Suomenlinna.

Next, we will meet online on Wednesday, July 1st at 17:00 EEST for the dandelion with its thousand faculties … worn away to its one recalcitrant element. During this session, we will celebrate the notion of phytocrip with Em Armstrong and listen to them speak of mighty hooks, parachutes and (demilitarised!) ballistic devices that seeds and plants practice to move around, and so do many of us. Moderated by Anastasia (A) Alevtin, the talk will shapeshift into a thematically-attuned writing session facilitated by (our one and only!) Char Heather.

No prior knowledge is required, but your curious (and why not criply cranky) bodymind.

To book your spot in the group, receive a PDF and audio version of readings, drop us a question or make an access request, email to (A)’s awaitingbody@gmail.com.

Next gatherings will take place on Wednesdays, July 29th, August 26th, September 30th, October 21st, and November 25th. We will spend the 7th afternoon on our own with an audio meditation (as always, available in writing, too).