Image credit: ‘Agri/cultural Practice’ workshop, Prinzessinengarten, Berlin, 2017. Courtesy of Nicole Wolf.
Mojisola Adebayo and Nicole Wolf, ‘Compos(t)ing body and soil methods for anti-colonial gardens. A Critical Exploration of Theatre of the Oppressed and Permaculture for practice-research’
Lecture: Tuesday 15 June 2021, 18.30-20.00
Join Zoom meeting: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93180051953?pwd=K0hqcVlvNlpOcjc0N3Fqb0gvUzVXQT09
Meeting ID: 931 8005 1953
Passcode: 329397
What could anti-colonial cultivation practices and anti-racist environmentalisms be in an urban context? How might they work from and with the many different relations and kinds of access to soil, to grounds, to commons, to urban infrastructures and to past and present structural racism and violence? What methodologies, what forms of inquiry, what collective and collaborative processes might we need to develop to create the conditions to explore such practices? What embodied ways of thinking and being together on the ground could support the work towards repair without redemption, without diversion of toxicity to an elsewhere, without appropriation and forgetful solutions. Mojisola Adebayo and Nicole Wolf will reflect on and further develop the “Agri/cultural Practice” workshop that was part of the “Growing from the ruins of modernity” (2019), a project by Marco Clausen and Åsa Sonjasdotter (for Neighbourhood Academy, at Prinzessinengarten, a community garden in Berlin). The workshop was part of an ongoing research process that explores permaculture ethics and principles and environmental racism through embodied and playful pedagogical methods of agri-cultural practice. Methods might lead to an assemblage of articulations along different forms of address in diverse registers including designs for accessible gardens, building up soil on concrete debris, growing food, reading groups, reflective writing and a theatre play.
Mojisola Adebayo (Berlin / London) is a playwright, performer, director, producer, workshop facilitator and lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. She holds a BA in Drama and Theatre Arts, an MA in Physical Theatre and a PhD in black queer theatre (Goldsmiths, Royal Holloway and Queen Mary, University of London). Mojisola trained extensively with Augusto Boal and is a specialist in Theatre of the Oppressed, working particularly in locations of conflict and crisis. She has worked in theatre, radio and television, on four continents, over the past 25 years, performing in over 50 productions, writing, devising and directing over 30 plays, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. Her own plays are concerned with climate change, racism, slavery, occupation, homophobia, Islamaphobia, gender-based violence, state crime and the Black Lives Matter movement. Publications include Mojisola Adebayo: Plays One and Plays Two (Oberon Books), 48 Minutes for Palestine in Theatre in Pieces (Methuen), and The Theatre for Development Handbook (co-written with John Martin and Manisha Mehta). Afriquia Theatre: Black Queer British Plays and Practitioners, co-edited with Lynette Goddard, is out in 2021 (Bloomsbury Methuen). Her latest play exploring the politics of sexual pleasure, STARS, opens in London in 2021. Mojisola was commissioned by the National Theatre to write Wind / Rush Generation(s), opening in 2021. She is currently writing Family Tree, which investigates gynaecology and gardening, historical medical experiments on Black women and soil extraction today.Family Tree is commissioned by Young Vic and ATC.
Nicole Wolf (Berlin/ London) is Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research, writing, pedagogical and curatorial projects have concentrated on political cinemas in South Asia and anti-colonial struggles, the co-constitutive processes and poetics of artistic, activist and movement narratives and more recently on agri/cultural practices and a Cinématics of the Soil. Her participation in ‘Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic Practice’ and ‘Archive ausser sich’ (both projects by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin) included research and writing for the restoration of film works by Yugantar, the first feminist film collective in India (1980-83) as well as the development of “Soil – City- Solidarity”, an interdisciplinary urban permaculture design course, and the symposium “’Tell me what matter was the ground’ – Repair beyond redemption”. Recent publications are “Is this just a story? Friendships and fictions for speculative alliances. The Yugantar film collective (1980-83)”, in MIRAJ 7.2. “Fugitive Remains: Soil, Celluloid and Resistant Collectivities”, with Sheikh, Shela; Ros Gray; Filipa César; Raphaël Grisey, and Bouba Touré. In: Cooking Sections, ed. The Empire Remains Shop. New York: Columbia Books, 2018. “In the Wake of Gujarat: The Social Relations of Translation and Futurity”. Critical Studies, 4, 2019. pp. 97-113. She is editor of the first book on the audio-visual and literary works of Merle Kroeger and Philip Scheffner, commissioned by Deutsche Dokumentarfilm Initiative, forthcoming 2021.
What Can A Garden Be?
Lecture and research methods workshops programme 2020-2021
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