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.
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.
Image credit: ‘Agri/cultural Practice’ workshop, Prinzessinengarten, Berlin, 2017. Courtesy of Nicole Wolf.
Lecture: Tuesday 15 June 2021, 18.30-20.00
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.
Priya Jay and Rehana Zaman, ‘Research as Ceremony’*
Workshop: Monday 21 June, 18.00-20.00
The Art Research Garden, 43 Lewisham Way, SE14 6NW, entrance on Parkfield Road
Image credit: Rehana Zaman, Your Ecstatic Self, 2019. Courtesy of Rehana Zaman.
For the workshop ‘Research as Ceremony’, Priya Jay and Rehana Zaman will be thinking aloud together about the gardens they know, the gardens they knew and the gardens they are. Together, they recount the day of filming for Your Ecstatic Self (2019), spent in Rehana’s allotment, planting hyssop, chamomile and burning bay. They will discuss spatio-temporal disruptions, ceremony as a process of encounter and lucid dreaming in green spaces. *The title of this workshop is gratefully borrowed from Shawn Wilson’s critical scholarship on indigenous research methodology.
Priya Jay is an artist whose practice involves writing, curating, study and somatics. Her research interests are rooted in embodied knowledge, grief, re-enchantment and technologies of healing. She takes cracks in the archives as her point of departure and arrival, experimenting with what wants to emerge or stay hidden. Priya’s recent work has centred on grief with Fevered Sleep, MAIA Group, Patchwork Archivists and Glasgow Zine Library, happiness with the Wellcome Collection and care work with Auto Italia.
Rehana Zaman is a London-based artist whose practice is concerned with the effect of multiple social dynamics on how individuals and groups relate. These narrative-based pieces, often deadpan and neurotic, are frequently generated through conversation and collaboration with others. Her working process varies with each project, from conventional production methods with a crew and actors, to 3-D animation, to collaboration with researchers, activist groups, members of the public and her family, or a combination of many of these processes at once. A driving question within Zaman’s work is how social political concerns, in addition to providing content, can structure how an artwork is produced. To this extent she has sought to apply methods influenced by radical pedagogy, as in the writings of Paulo Freire, and psychosocial dynamics rooted in Black feminist thought. Zaman is a founding member of the Women of Colour Index Reading group and is frequently invited to devise and deliver workshops, talks and events for groups and organisations. Zaman’s solo exhibitions include Studio Voltaire, London; Material Art Fair IV, Mexico City and The Tetley, Leeds. Her work was also part of group exhibitions in Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Whitechapel, London; Serpentine Galleries, London and Syndicate, Cologne, among others.
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.
Image credit: ‘The Sun’, from The Budapest Tarot, The Tarot Sheet Revival. Courtesy Daniella Valz Gen.