What can the academy garden teach us about ecology? In response to the climate emergency, we are called to action, to gather our efforts in transdisciplinary collective practices. Who and what makes the academy garden? questions how we can evolve a more inclusive art practice by working closely together with this garden. This approach of decentring humans recognises the agency of the garden and dissolves the nature/culture dichotomy into a multispecies community garden.
Who and what makes an academy garden? is research into gardening as a collective artistic practice in a more than human perspective, centred in the garden at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Together with the students and the various species we study a more real awareness of the garden, guided by curiosity and mutual care.
This research encompasses:
- Weekly open gardening sessions, students garden together, we appeal to their artistic talent
- Ecology as a course for visual arts students, or gardening as artistic practice
- Rereading of the Royal Decree from 1974 and propose a new garden design expanding on the identity of the academy garden
- Making the artist book 'the academy garden', about gardening as a practice in the academy garden
- Reading the garden from a queer perspective by undoing nature from supernormative labels
Promotors: Heide Hinrichs (Academy) and Pascal Gielen (UAntwerp)
(image: The academy garden, a multispecies community)
