Image credit: ‘The Sun’, from The Budapest Tarot, The Tarot Sheet Revival. Courtesy Daniella Valz Gen.
Daniella Valz Gen, ‘Sensing the Elements: Fire’
Workshop: Tuesday 6 July 2021, 18.00-20.00
The Art Research Garden, 43 Lewisham Way, SE14 6NW, entrance on Parkfield Road
Following on from their lecture ‘On (be)longing as Oracular Practice’ (see above), this creative writing workshop will explore the element of Fire through poetry, somatic practice and observation. The gathering will take place outdoors at the site of the Art Research Garden (weather allowing) around a fire just after the Summer Solstice.
What Can A Garden Be?
Lecture and research methods workshops programme 2020-21
In this series of talks and seminars funded by CHASE, we hear from artists, curators, activists and researchers whose work is grounded in practices of sustainability, decoloniality, permaculture, queering nature, nurturing place-based knowledge, building community and resilience in opposition to colonial imaginaries. The lectures provide the stimulus for PhD workshops addressing key research methods, such as working with ephemeral infrastructures, decolonial strategy, transdisciplinary research that challenges art–science divisions, knowledge sharing, mapping and more-than-human collaborations. In so doing, the series aims to critically address the coloniality of the garden and its role in dispossession and segregation, recalling the etymology of the word ‘garden’ and its roots in the Old English word geard, meaning enclosure. Developing an Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths in the midst of global climate emergency, ecological breakdown and a pandemic that has accelerated racialised policing of green spaces, raises crucial questions about the histories of exclusion and extraction that the Western colonial garden has maintained, be it in the form of pleasure parks, private gardens, nature reserves or botanical gardens. From provision grounds to indigenous land pedagogies, from urban community gardens and allotment plots to the olive grove as place of gathering to share knowledge, and from re-wilding projects and to climate justice work, what are the compelling examples of practices that can we look to in thinking about what a garden could be?
A New Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths
The Art department has initiated plans for an Art Research Garden that will operate as a micro-context from which to observe change in our natural environment, and facilitate a wide range of artistic research into living systems, cultivation and processing of plants, from food to pigments, rewilding, soil care, composting, the benefits of plants in alleviating pollution, eco-pedagogy, and the therapeutic and social benefits of gardening, as well as a space for teaching and public engagement through workshops, performance and other events. The Art Research Garden will support ecological artistic research and teaching, knowledge transfer and public engagement, including outdoor and indoor growing, cooking facilities and a teaching space, all with disabled access. It will provide an experimental laboratory for developing new forms of artistic research that build creativity, resilience and innovation in sustainability in the context of the ecological emergency we face.
Other events in the series