Victims to Pomona
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This work was completed as part of my Masters thesis at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
Victims to Pomona suggests that mistletoe and its favourite host, domesticated apple trees, are united through a groundlessness found in roots that are not their own. Apples and mistletoe share botanical, cultural, economic and ecological resources—through myriad vectors, they produce each other. Using two AIs, one trained on a corpus of horticultural texts and the other on accounts of botanical magic and unruly ecologies, this project challenges the presupposed hierarchy between sub/main text and host/parasite. It dwells in between designations—old, new and ongoing—and channels parasitism as a generative force, not a destructive one, to examine how apples and mistletoe discursively conjure each other into being.