In this series of talks and seminars funded by CHASE, we will 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 will 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, however, 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.
Beacon Garden, 2019. Image courtesy of Marcia Chandra.
Harun Morrison, ‘Beacon Garden, Dagenham’
Public lecture and screening: Tuesday 19 January 2021, 18.30-20.00
Join Zoom meeting: https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/96432669773?pwd=VkN2YVlMb2g3VHlhLyt5eGd6NWFiZz09
Artist Harun Morrison shares and narrates a rough cut of a video documenting the transformation of a car park in Dagenham into a community garden with footage taken over six months in 2019. Beacon Garden was designed in dialogue with local residents with varying levels of experience. The video captures a communal journey of learning-with-peers and argues for the value of slow, open-ended processes. The narration will reference the social design practices of key influences and co-thinkers including MUF, founding partners Katherine Clarke and Liza Fior, and Apparata, who designed and oversaw the renovation of The White House, an art and social space in Dagenham adjacent to Beacon Garden. This will be contextualised through the writings and sketches of Colin Ward and architect Yona Friedman.
Harun Morrison is an artist and writer currently living on a narrow boat on Regent’s Canal. Alongside Helen Walker, he co-founded the collective art practice ‘They Are Here’ in 2006.Through this collaboration they explore group dynamics, questions of authorship and politics of visibility. Recent commissions include I’ll Bring You Flowers (2019) Survival Kit 10, Riga, Laughing Matter (2018) at Studio Voltaire, the performance 40 Temps, 8 Days (2017) at Tate Modern and Beacon Garden (2018 - 2020), a commission to co-design and community build a public garden in Dagenham, East London at the invitation of Create London. Harun has an MA in Critical Writing from Chelsea College of Art and Design. He is former artist-in-residence with Arts Catalyst and IASPIS & Botyrka Konsthall, Stockholm (2018). Forthcoming work will be shown at Dakar Biennial, Senegal (2021) and Eastside Projects in Birmingham (2021) and a new garden for Bootle Library in Merseyside, Liverpool commissioned by Rule of Threes. Harun is an associate lecturer at Central St Martins and is part of the associate faculty of the recently established studio program Conditions, in Croydon. Since 2019 Harun has been a trustee of the Black Cultural Archive (est.1981).
PLEASE NOTE – THIS EVENT WILL NOT BE RECORDED
Dr Ros Gray (she/her)
Senior Lecturer in Fine Art (Critical Studies) 0.7, Department of Art
Please note I work on the following days: BA Fine Art - Mondays and Wednesdays; MFA Fine Art - Tuesdays
Podcast: Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh, 'The Coloniality of Planting', The Botanical Mind (Camden Art Centre, August 2020) https://www.botanicalmind.online/podcasts/the-coloniality-of-plantingMonograph: Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968-1991 (James Currey, January 2020)
https://boydellandbrewer.com/cinemas-of-the-mozambican-revolution-hb.html
Third Text Editor
Coordinator of the Goldsmiths Allotment
Critical Ecologies - Technologies, Worlds, Politics http://www.gold.ac.uk/research/technologies-worlds-politics/