Join Zoom meeting: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95362056872?pwd=UlNJbUg1aTlnWmJGZzNNd1JmRVpYdz09
Plots and plans and plants and pots – the alliteration does not roll off the tongue, but rather stumbles through a set of familiar words that, pushed together awkwardly, jostle with new associations. Indeed, the garden is a crowded space, full of connections and evocations, of secret nooks and forgotten seeds, cyclical temporalities and sporadic emergencies, and as rife with competition for resources (light, water, nutrients) as it is with symbiotic collaboration and the pleasures of inter-species mingling. This workshop invites contributions to think about how the Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths might operate and the kinds of artistic research it might nurture. Participants are encouraged to make speculative proposals for how the Art Research Garden could support their research. In the workshop we will share these ideas and artist Trasi Henen will produce an animated diagram of the conversation as a resource for further work. The workshop will consider various examples and histories of gardens and of gardening in relation to artistic research. Gardens have a long been sites of knowledge production, from botanical gardens that functioned as the apparatus of colonial and patriarchal knowledge production and value extraction, to provision grounds, allotments and kitchen gardens, which historically were marginal spaces used by enslaved peoples, the proletariat, women and children for the cultivation of food and medicines. The garden has also been a site for experimentation (sometimes violent) with different ways of growing, cultivating, fermenting and relating, and for the making of matter into materials.
The workshop will consider the garden as site of translation as well as transplantation, involving different kinds of knowledge – scientific, tacit, somatic, trans-generational and evolving across species. . As such, how can we understand the Art Research Garden as a space for cultivating what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls an ‘ecology of knowledges’? What does thinking the space of the garden and practices of gardening open up for understanding the process and pace of artistic research? How might the garden be understood as a space where through creativity, attentiveness and reciprocity, as Robin Wall Kimerer suggests, ‘something essential happens’?
Dr Ros Gray is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Critical Studies, in the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, where she is leading the development of the new MA Art & Ecology and the Art Research Garden. In recent years her research has two main trajectories: The first explores networks, aesthetics and impact of militant filmmaking, particularly in Mozambique, which is the subject of her monograph Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968-1991.
The second focuses on artistic interventions in the fields of soil care, cultivation, wildness and decolonial ecologies more broadly. Her collaboration with Shela Sheikh includes co-editing a special issue of Third Text entitled ‘The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions’ and the podcast The Coloniality of Planting for the Botanical Minds series commissioned by Camden Arts Centre, London. For the last five years, Ros has co-ordinated the Goldsmiths allotment, which is a place on campus for staff and students to grow plants, compost and nurture biodiversity, hosting workshops, seasonal events and exhibitions. She was also one of the initiators of the student-staff campaign for a Green New Deal for Goldsmiths, which is currently being developed as the university’s environmental policy.