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Roots of Reciprocity: Cultivating Care and Restoration
Gardening as an Infrastructure of Reciprocity
Nele Buyst
As opposed to urban planning and policy as a flattening and static approach to conceive of place and matter, gardening is an example of a practice that requires repeated, embodied participation in volumetric space (Tănăsescu) with all senses. I want to develop thoughts on the community garden as an infrastructure of reciprocity (Tănăsescu) that enhances small, situated, and local reciprocal ethics and politics of care.
TOMAT is a project that connects newcomers in Ghent, Belgium to an old convent garden with its community of seeds, soil, weeds, and worms, amongst others. The project aims to create an environment for people to work, learn, and connect, to disrupt hierarchies in traditional teacher-student roles, and to emancipate through shared practical knowledge. Gardening requires attention for the creatures present and living in the garden, and those working in and around it. The garden offers a place for repeated encounters and attention for all those involved in co-creating the garden. Attention creates an awareness of reversibility: it turns perceived objects into subjects (Merleau-Ponty), which changes awareness, thought, and language (Kimmerer, Kropotkin), and inspires an ethics of reciprocity and care (Puig de la Bellacasa) for both humans and more than humans.
Repeatedly participating in the events (Whitehead) that create an environment offers a chance to become part of a community, creates affective relationships between humans, more than humans and place, and a sense of belonging. The garden is a place of becoming. It is a place that is constantly changing and communicating in ways that require all senses. It makes the importance of care and attention felt, as a community project this however never depends on an individual. The repeated practice of gardening mutually benefits all creatures that consider the garden as a home and may turn the everyday work of living on a damaged planet into an art (Haraway).
Nele Buyst (1983, Ghent) works as a poet and as a PhD student at the University of Antwerp in the Department of Philosophy. She is the author of Regels (Poëziecentrum, 2020) and CORPS, poreus (het balanseer, 2024). Her research focuses on ecology, vulnerability, relationality, and repair, through the practice and the metaphor of kintsugi, a Japanese technique to restore broken ceramics. Her poetry and essays on the survival strategies of more-than-human organisms, care, ecology, and pedagogy have been published in, amongst others, rekto:verso and nY.
Negotiating Dilemma’s in Designing a Multi-Species Market Garden
Elisabeth Wesseling
Permacultural agriculture designs integrated care webs that aspire towards harmony, balance, and proportion between humans, animals, plants, and the (micro-)organisms animating the soil, to create circular naturecultural systems. In permaculture, ethics and aesthetics are closely intermeshed: harmony, proportion, balance, and closed circles are concepts deriving their meaning and significance from both realms of thought. Permaculture is quite topical, as it promises a way out of the extractivist mode that approaches the more than human world as a mere resource for human needs. Facing the depletion and pollution of soil, water, and air that extractivism has caused, indigenous approaches to procuring food have acquired a new relevance today. It is this expertise that permaculture is based on.
Transitioning from extractivism to permaculture is a complex endeavor generating serious dilemma’s for arable farming. This lecture will present some of the ethical-aesthetic dilemma’s I am facing while practicing arable farming as a multi-species care practice. It is informed by eco-feminism (Plumwood, 1993; Haraway, 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), indigenous/permacultural theories (Mollison, 1988; Starhawk, 2004; Kimmerer, 2013) and my everyday experience as a market gardener. The aim is not at all to debunk theory by opposing it to practice, but rather to demonstrate how both are crucial to the project of moving beyond industrialized modes of farming. In the process, I will unfold a gendered and postcolonial perspective on how permacultural teachings are disseminated in Western societies today.
References
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Mollison, B. (1988). Permaculture: A designer’s manual. Tagari Publications.
Plumwood, V. (1998). Feminism and the mastery of nature. Routledge.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Starhawk (2004). The earth path: Grounding your spirit in the rhythms of nature. HarperCollins.
Elisabeth Wesseling is affiliated as professor of Cultural Memory, Gender and Diversity to the Department of Literature and Art of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) of Maastricht University. She has published in the fields of young people’s texts and cultures, critical adoption studies, and eco-criticism. Lies Wesseling was the director of the Centre for Gender and Diversity at FASoS from 2011-2022 and president of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. She is currently in transition to a new profession as market gardener in the Belgian Ardennes.
Fallowing as a Framework for Reparative Justice
Anne Pind
On what ground do we build? And what is left to build from, in times of climate crisis? In 2020, the Association of German Architects published the manifesto Planet Home, which calls for “a new culture of maintenance and repair,” emphasizing that architects need to become caretakers of both built and unbuilt environments for future generations. It is a radical call to stop extracting materials and stop generating new sites of waste, to instead value, maintain, and fertilize situated site-relations.
The history of architecture has been preoccupied with singular tabula rasa-built masterpieces and a limited set of modernist heroes on the straight path to progress. Who did we not listen to, in the age of industrialization, who lingered behind in the margin, when capitalist paradigms of fast return turned farmlands into monocrop factories of growth?
With this paper, I invite you to follow the subversive threads of a fallow tapestry carpet, commissioned in 1919 by organic farmer, feminist and owner of the Fogelstad Estate in Sweden, Elisabeth Tamm. Fallowing is a long-known regenerative practice that enhances and restores soil fertility. A fallow process cannot be controlled or foreseen. From the perspective of large-scale industrial farming, fallow is a waste-of-time-land: fallowing temporalities linger along the straight lines of production.
In Swedish, fallow, träde, has multiple meanings: to thread a needle, to cross a boundary, and to plow fallow ground. Thus, träda interlaces the mending of fabrics with soil practices, interior and exterior reproductive work. Anticipating the founding of the Women’s Citizen’s School at Fogelstad in 1925, I will propose that the fallow carpet lay the ground for a political ecology and more-than-social movement, by interlacing questions of peace, suffrage, soil care and maintenance (without end).
From here, we can ask: How can fallowing become a framework for reparative justice?
My name is Anne Pind. I am an architect by education and currently a PhD fellow at the Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, and Conservation, Institute for Architecture and Culture, Copenhagen, and Landscape, Architecture and Planning, University of Copenhagen (double affiliation). My supervisors are Assistant Professors Svava Riesto, Henriette Steiner, and Niels Grønbæk. The title of my thesis is Politics of Maintenance – Cultures of Care: Ecofeminist Movements in the History of Architecture.
I am researching ecofeminist milieus in the Nordic countries from 1900-1980, following teaching, building, and farming practices in the women’s movement to bring questions of ownership, maintenance, and co-creation into architectural histories. Prior to these studies I have practiced as an architect the field of conservation and maintenance, taught at the Royal Academy (bachelor and master level), edited Danish architecture magazine Arkitekten, and worked as a critic for Danish newspaper Politiken.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
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