We are living in the midst of a period of mass extinction, yet weeds seem to be thriving everywhere you look. While other species are disappearing, weeds are popping up in surprising places and unexpected configurations. They appear to crowd out and climb over others, form collaborations with those who allow them to proliferate, and evolve right before our eyes. These species are vigorously inhabiting the Anthropocene’s landscapes of loss. What does our entanglement with these agentive species reveal about us? What does collaborative survival mean in a world of weedy emergence?

The Museum of Weediness is a curated pile of organisms observed during our artist residency at Prairie Ronde. The project consists of a series of bronze ‘disturbance marks’ recognizing the thriving species we encountered across 120 acres of the Mill at Vicksburg—its industrial brownfield site, creek, surrounding wetlands, and historical mill building. Each bronze mark notates the common name of an observed species, an ascension number, the year it was recorded, and a condition of the organism’s weediness (text by the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing).

Visitors can participate in a self-guided tour of the Mill campus to locate the disturbance marks and to observe the spiky, scrubby, stinky, noxious, irritating, nuisance species that animate our human-disturbed landscape.