September 22 - Going Bananas

Picture this: A bird’s nest, made of twigs and little paper mache eggs, is perched in the lonely old tree that rests in front of the library. Nestled among the eggs, a plastic toy airplane pokes its nose towards the sky.
Hanging from a branch just below the nest, a hand scribbled sign asks: “Where do you think all our brilliant ideas come from, anyway?”

One of the students in our group is quite enthusiastic about this sort of thing – it’s widely known as Guerilla Art. Her intention with this specific example was to draw onlookers’ attention back to nature as inspiration, even for our most sophisticated technologies – although any interpretation would have been just as effective. The idea behind Guerrilla Art can be to draw attention to a particular issue, to add beauty to the world, to break the monotony in day-to-day routines, to challenge the way others see certain aspects of the world, just to make people think, etc. etc… as long as it’s essentially anonymous and in a public area.

Our group got inspired after she gave her “guerrilla art” presentation, and we’ve decided to storm the community with bananas. We’ve got a giant traveling cardboard banana this week, to be followed by small bananas hanging from apple trees and a few of us in banana suits next Friday at the community dinner. And to top it all off, there’s a method to our madness, which we will describe in detail on our community bulletin board next Friday:

We discovered that Findhorn, renowned for its gigantic and plentiful vegetable gardens and admirable eco-friendly aims, has been importing bananas from Central America. And not just any bananas, but Dole bananas (Dole has some particularly unsavory political/environmental/human rights history, which I can share with you at a later date). Shocked and dismayed, we complained righteously for a few weeks, and then guerrilla art gave us a way to let the wider community know what was going on (the bananas are only for guests) and hopefully spark discussion and change through whimsy. I’ll keep you updated.

No, I don’t know who will be wearing the banana costume.