Fruiting Bodies seeks to demonstrate the viability of fruiting trees in the public realm, to make evident their many benefits, including their potential to engender a new participatory logic and to counter modernist, masculine ideals of the tidy city.

Fruiting Bodies is an ongoing project of Inclusive Ecologies of Pratt Institute. Last fall three living pawpaw classrooms were planted: one at Hudson Basilica, one at Kite's Nest (also in Hudson), and one at Bayview Houses in Brooklyn. The pawpaw, a tree that is native to the eastern us, is the only "truly extratropical" plant within a family of tropical trees with oddly shaped, fragrant, and edible fruit with large seeds. It was a valued food source for indigenous peoples living along eastern rivers and creeks and enslaved Africans in the American south. Its range is currently expanding in the northeast, with increasing temperatures due to climate change.

Inclusive Ecologies asks the question: How have pragmatic reasons for not planting fruiting trees in the public realm reflected larger cultural anxieties about the body, about control, about decay and mortality? Fruiting Bodies imagines participatory rituals of cultivation and care, to relish the messiness of fruit, and fruiting bodies, including our own, to examine how stories about, and perhaps communication with, plants can illuminate previously marginalized and new unexpected narratives.