VISIONARY INSTITUTE
The Garden of Resistance, The New Matrix and the Time to Come! Metal, Liverpool 2017
A day-long communal gathering at Metal Edge Hill Station Garden (August 24th, 2017) that involved workshops, live performances, presentations, and an ‘imaginative space’ for making and thinking together. The event was deliberately not curated solely by me, rather it was collectively activated to celebrate the garden, and the formation of temporary communities. I called this group a “covert eco-poetic society”. There were artworks by various people installed in situ, food and fire. More information below.
The video records people interacting with the permaculture forest garden in Otterpool and Edge Hill Garden. It shows seasonal activities such as sowing seeds, mulching, weeding, and socialising around a fire.
I read the concept of garden as meaning any environment from which something grows and develops, be it food, art, or ideology. The term garden became a matrix providing a means for new ways of seeing the world and resisting debilitating forces of capitalism or institutional politics. Garden appeared to me to be a political and a healing agent, an exhibition, a work of art, reminding me of a principle put forward by permaculture founder, Bill Mollison, ‘everything gardens or has an effect on its environment’.
This video work is available on request.