In autumn 2021 Covid had kicked in again and the Jan Van Eyck Academie went into full lockdown. On a systemic level, the pandemic pointed at the dysfunctional ways in which our work influence our lives and had allowed for some reflection on these matters. Although I found myself privileged to attend my studio practice almost during the entire pandemic, I felt that the global state of things aggravated my thoughts around work and care significantly, and highlighted both a personal and planetary state of exhaustion. In this time we were also re-arranging the way we worked in my collective, which led us to question the mental and material means of artistic production in general. I started questioning how I could defy material accumulation in my practice, how my work could welcome transient circumstances, and in what ways both my own work and the work of Soft Protest Digest could become more embedded in a local context and more “infrastructural”.

Following this reasoning I decided to unearth the garden on the academy’s ground. Interestingly, gardening became such a common activity for many during the pandemic because I think that, more than anything, the process of gardening is an exercise in observation and maintenance which connects us to a more cyclical way of existence, perhaps especially prevalent in times of crisis. I guess that it also gives us a sense of control and empowerment, although most gardeners know that it is a very unstable form of control, that has much to do with collaborating and the discontentment and pleasures that come with it. When you finally realise that you are just the mere facilitator of the place of growth, whose work is to support, care for, maintain, assist, encourage and co-author with a multitudes of non-humans as well as humans, it becomes much easier. When I took on the gardening work, it was as if the entire place got activated. I saw that when you give attention to something, soon that generosity multiplies—and almost immediately several participants came to rescue with putting the compost and digging out the raised beds, and the whole project suddenly became more participatory.

The initial idea with the garden was also to provide the JvE cafe with vegetables, but the circumstances e.g lack of sun, poor germination, snail invasion etc. didn’t allow for as much “outcome” as anticipated. I do find it more relevant that it became, in its own right, a “non-productive” place. The spatial intervention, camouflaged as a garden, became a place where everyday knowledge, uncommon knowledge and embodied knowledge intervened with institutional bodies and grew as a green monster of possibilities, temporalities and habitats. Silvia Federici writes: “Can we think of gardens as more than a food source and also as a center of sociality, knowledge production, and cultural exchange?”(1) Her words resonate with my questions: Can we think of gardens as a portal into understanding important histories? Can we think of gardens as sites of experimental ecological thought, sites of learning with our environment? And therefore can we also consider gardens as places of resistance, as places of commoning?

In keeping with my own mantra of making more infrastructural work, I made a Wikipedia resource and a website as an attempt to share the rumination accumulated during the process of making a garden, along with practicalities. This will hopefully encourage others to embody land based work and knowledge for themselves, the resources being a practical infrastructure for new participants at the JvE to possibly carry on this work as well.

   1.   Silvia Federici, Peter Linebaugh. “Re-enchanting the World”