Wild Seeds in America is based on Bartana’s 2005 video Wild Seeds, in which a group of eighteen-year-old Israeli pacifists recreate scenes from the Disengagement from Gaza earlier that year. Evading two of their friends who play the role of the military who came to evacuate them, they chant “No, we won’t go” and other lines used by the settlers removed from the land. The New York iteration was translated and transferred to Union Square Park, with students from the New School who learn the original context of the game in progressive stages. The experiment looks at how one society’s rituals and behaviors of dissent are received outside of their original social context, and how knowledge shapes that experience

The performance was commissioned by Parsons in conjunction with the exhibition, “OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding” and was presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “Branding Democracy.”