Swale: Collaborative Floating Edible Art Project

What is Swale? It’s part public art project and part floating food barge with an edible garden and forest on a tenth of an acre that produces food for free. It has the ability to dock to different parts of the city supplying different residents with free food and a chance to explore the gardens.

From the site, swaleny.org:

Swale, a collaborative floating food project, is dedicated to rethinking and challenging New York City’s connection to our environment. Built on an 80-foot by 30-foot floating platform, Swale contains an edible forest garden. Functioning as both a sculpture and a tool, Swale provides free healthy food at the intersection of public art and service. With Swale, we want to reinforce water as a commons, and work towards fresh food as a commons too.

Art is integral to imagining new worlds. By continuing to create and explore new ways of living, we hope that Swale will strengthen our ways of collaborating, of cooperating, and of supporting one another. At its heart, Swale is a call to action. It asks us to reconsider our food systems, to confirm our belief in food as a human right, and to pave pathways to create public food in public space.

The project is led by Mary Mattingly and has many collaborators on board. Mary was instrumental in Waterpod, a 6 month effort of 5 people (including herself) living exclusively at and on what a 100 foot by 30 foot barge produced. They had chickens for eggs, re-used rainwater, and grew plant based food. In addition, she led the mobile sculptural ecosystem, WetLand, currently part of the Environmental Humanities program at the University of Pennsylvania.

She’s raised half of the required funds for the Swale project, and is looking for the other half via Kickstarter. In the video below, Mary Mattingly asks “What if free, healthy food was a public service and not an expensive commodity?” Indeed.