On my latest visit to Cagibi, I decided to check out what was available in their Distroboto. To my surprise, I found Sprout Out Loud, an urban plant reclamation ensemble!

Their mission: invite people every Sunday until snow falls on Montreal to help transform a vacant site into a community garden.

For $2, you can get your package with all the information needed and sunflower seeds – which is the easiest plant to grow from our research done for our previous seed bomb workshop.

I invite you to visit Emily Rose Michaud’s online blog about the project here and take part of it, especially if you live around or in the Mile-End.

Finally, the photos are here! The event was a success. It was a gorgeous day to stay outside and make seed bombs with great company.

We put up a table with all the steps and people just had to mix in the different seeds they brought. I think everyone got to leave with approximately 25 seed bombs or so.

We plan on doing a bike ride for the people who still have some left, I sure do! Social Distraction also hopes to redo this event in the summer as we know lots of you want another chance to make some.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who showed up. It was a pleasure!

Photo credits: Maxime Lefrançois and Sofia Shendi

English follow –

Enfin une première activité à notre calendrier! En collaboration avec le collectif “Get off the internet!”, nous vous invitons à un atelier de fabrication de seed bombs en date du dimanche 19 avril 2009. Au menu, ambiance, musique, amis, atelier et hotdogs. Lors de l’atelier, nous fabriquerons sur place quelques centaines de seed bombs, qui après séchage pourront être dispersées sur divers terrains vague et ainsi embellir les terrains vagues et autres espaces abandonnés de votre quartier.

Pour ceux qui le désirent, une balade en vélo sera organisée un soir de semaine pour lancer les seed bombs.

Pour vous inscrire à l’événement, veuillez vous rendre sur notre page Facebook.

Liens pertinents :

http://containergardening.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/seed-bombs-for-guerilla-gardening-funnytimehappygardenexplosion/

www.guerillagardening.org

At last, here’s our first event! In collaboration with the collective “Get off the Internet!”, we invite you at our seed bombs workshop on april 19th. Music, friends, workshop and hotdogs will be there waiting for you. We will make a few hundreds of seed bombs ready to embellish an empty lot in your neighborhood.

Also, a bike ride will be organized later on a week night to throw your seed bombs.

To register to our event, please rsvp on our Facebook page.

The concept is very simple and powerful, post an assignment and let strangers take part in it. They then send back a report with ie: photos and are added to the site. Some of them are then recontacted to send the physical version of their assignment to a random location where July and Fletcher host an art exhibition.

I discovered this site a few minutes ago and I’m already in love with it! It seems that whole families and school classes even took part in the process. I think Social Distraction needs to try this out too then.

Latest assignment (taken from the site):

Assignment #70
Say goodbye.

Sometimes it’s hard to say goodbye. It just feels easier to keep holding on. But in the long run it’s usually a good idea to let go, it’s the daring thing to do. It allows room for new things, for transformation. And maybe the goodbye isn’t even forever, but you can’t know until you really say goodbye and mean it. In some cases, goodbye is really the end, and good riddance! For this assignment, say goodbye to all the things you need to let go of: bad habits, dead people, alive people, ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, self-destructive feelings and behaviors, jobs, projects, re-occuring thoughts, etc.
Write it as a simple list:
Goodbye Bill.
Goodbye wetting the bed.
Good bye interrupting people when they are talking.
etc.

It can be as long or as short as you like. And, most importantly, take a moment with each one to really say goodbye. This isn’t a catalogue of your fears and faults, this is a ceremony to bid them farewell.Please don’t send us HELLOS, only goodbyes.

So I’ve been quite sick lately which gave me time to check out my favorite blogs and see what’s up. One thing I found which I really liked was about this ‘Chris’ guy letting very personal invites in the streets, kind of like facebook events or craigslist ads.

Image from zoomdoggle.com

This is an example of what we call guerilla art, a great medium of communication that changes the way we see our regular urban streets and makes us stop to read and experience what’s around us. It’s also a way to bring strangers closer by trying an experiment together. I’ve read a book about it named The Guerilla Art Kit which is full of wonderful ideas.

Image from Google Images

Have any of you ever tried street art and what did you do exactly? Any photos? Would love to share what has been done in Montreal!