Guerrilla Gardening With Illuminating Herbs

Back in 2010 we wrote an article about the green shining pharmacy crosses you find everywhere in South European cities. The guys of Madrid-based Luzinterruptus have made yet another brilliant ambient artwork criticizing this phenomenon. Their work Pharmacy Herbs is a series of three temporary artificial micro parks consisting of fluorescent sticks. At three downtown locations in Madrid Luzinterruptus created illuminating fields that looked like small nuclear greeneries.

According to the artists, the overload of green pharmacy signs are a huge form of light pollution. People living close to a pharmacy have green light in their rooms 24 hours a day and no choice to switch it off. The green pharmaceutical crosses produce so much light onto the streets that the artists have wondered what would happen when photosynthesis would occur at these place as a consequence of the reflection of the green light on the streets.

“Without wanting to play down such a serious subject, but trying to approach it with a sense of humor, which never hurts, we carried out our installation Mutant weeds in which we recreated a not-too-distant future, in which a new and hardy species of photosensitive plant, grows in the asphalt around the pharmacies, nourished by the photosynthesis of its powerful ‘low’ light.”