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.

The video captures a communal journey of learning-with-peers and argues for the value of slow, open-ended processes. Beacon Garden was designed in dialogue with local residents with varying levels of experience. Public lecture and screening: Tuesday 19 January 2021, 18.30-20.00Īrtist 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. Harun Morrison, ‘Beacon Garden, Dagenham’ 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.īeacon Garden, 2019. 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. 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?Ī 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. 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. 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. 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 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.

Mfa communities at autumn chase