Swale (2016–ongoing) is a floating food forest initiated by artist Mary Mattingly on a barge that travels through New York City’s waterways. Planted with fruit trees, perennial herbs, and vegetables, the project invites the public to harvest food freely, an act that is largely prohibited on public land in the city. By situating itself on water, Swale moves outside those restrictions, creating a loophole that becomes a living artwork, a commons, and a form of civil disobedience.
Visitors step aboard the barge to wander among edible plants, participate in workshops, or simply experience what a shared ecology might feel like in the middle of an urban environment. The project is at once sculptural and practical, operating as an evolving ecosystem, an educational platform, and a proposition for new relationships between food, law, and public space.
Swale reframes art as infrastructure for shared survival, insisting that nourishment can be both a right and a collective practice. By drifting between piers and neighborhoods, Swale embodies prefigurative politics: it does not only point toward a more just future but briefly enacts it, a garden afloat on borrowed water.
See also: House and Universe
First video from Swale Kickstarter page. Images from Mary Mattingly.
