Initiative sited at s/W/s with online garden log
29 August 2020 - 31 January 2021

Shifting grounds call for timely earthly attention. A garden forms a practice-site to live out forms of living more aligned with a changing global food system. As concurrent crises alternately numb, scare, and exhaust those paying attention, scaling attentions to different resolutions could allow greater agentic clarity. With garden as practice, we might allow the work of sustaining the living body we know best to lead a methodological resolve towards hybrid kinships with other living bodies: through sense, touch and cultivation, towards allyship, care, and repose. To build a garden, one could heap materials together into a desired aesthetic form. But to grow a garden, we might learn to synchronise our rhythms with the living biota of a soil community—both human and non-human.

The garden forms a physical setting for artistic and creative tangents within soft/WALL/studs to entangle with capacities and desires without. Its physical body intersects the dynamic living fabric it responds to of edible foodways in the neighbourhood of soft/WALL/studs, and artists’ modes of address and resonance with a living soil community; its body gives weight to the politics of extra-local terra-forming, and extra-local agency. The garden involves collaborators outside of soft/WALL/studs. At times of great external change, nurturing our inner capacities to observe emotional polarities unfolding around us might help us find our way to forms of agency we can live with, and for.