Category Archives: Landscapes of Quarantine

Until Proven Safe

Behold! Edible Geography rises, vampire*-like, from the dead, for today marks the publication of my very first book! Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine is co-authored with Geoff Manaugh, whom long-time readers of this blog will recognize as my husband and frequent collaborator, as well as the author of BLDGBLOG and, more […]

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The Taste of Quarantine

For me, one of the most exciting aspects of the Landscapes of Quarantine studio that Geoff Manaugh and I ran last autumn was its multidisciplinarity. On any given Tuesday evening, we’d see a game designer giving feedback to a set designer, a comic book illustrator comparing storylines with a fiction writer, and architects brainstorming with artists. Meanwhile, the resulting works – on display now at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City – were realised in materials as diverse as bentonite clay, Aerochrome film, medical-grade Tyvek, and tear-off pads.

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Landscapes of Quarantine

I’m delighted to announce that Landscapes of Quarantine, an exhibition I co-curated with Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, will be opening at New York City’s Storefront for Art and Architecture at 7 p.m. on March 10. Unfortunately, that means that we’re spending this week painting, installing, and picking up beer for the opening – apologies for the lack of posts in the meantime.

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The Great Green Saharan Wall, Redux

Algeria is not a small country – according to Wikipedia, it is one hundred times the size of Texas – but eighty-five percent of its territory consists of the Sahara desert. In fact, only a thin strip of land along the northern coastal edge of the country is cultivable.

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Landscapes of Quarantine: Cheap Wine, Hummus, and Other Highlights

As some of you may know, this autumn, BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography have been co-hosting a New York City-based design studio dedicated to exploring the landscapes of quarantine. Each Tuesday evening for the past eight weeks, our group of sixteen participants has gathered to discuss the physical, geographical, human, biological, geological, ethical, architectural, ecological, infrastructural, social, political, religious, temporal, and even astronomical dimensions of quarantine –

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Behavioural Borders

As a curious coda to my previous post, in which Kew’s Plant Health and Quarantine Officer, Sara Redstone, notes the frequent mismatch between biological and political borders and discusses the role of quarantine in creating an artificial biological boundary, I was intrigued by this post on the Foreign Policy editors’ blog, Passport, reporting on political […]

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Plants Without Borders: An Interview with Sara Redstone

Sara Redstone is the Plant Health and Quarantine Officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, home of the world’s largest collection of living plants. In addition to screening and isolating all incoming or outbound plant material, she is currently overseeing the design and construction of a new quarantine facility for the Gardens. As part of […]

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Biology at the Border: An Interview with Alison Bashford

Alison Bashford is Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science, as well as Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Her work has examined the political, cultural, and spatial implications of quarantine at a variety of different scales, from immigration law and geopolitics to the design of nineteenth-century hospitals.

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The Last Town on Earth: An Interview with Thomas Mullen

This autumn in New York City, Edible Geography and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to lead an 8-week design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine; you can read more about it here. For our studio participants, we have been assembling a course pack full of original content and interviews—but we decided that we should […]

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Agricultural Asylum

“Non-GMO corn seeks asylum in France,” read the Agence France Presse headline (more or less, given my rusty French). The article went on to explain that on Tuesday, September 29, “non GMO ears of corn from Spain sought refuge in the arms of the French Embassy, petitioning for agricultural asylum.” Somewhat disappointingly, this turned out […]

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