Emergence and Disapearance

Emergence and disapearance

An eight year project initiated by a group of autistic and dyslexic artists and gardeners who occupied a piece of land belonging to “Action For Children” in North London, the Central National Office of one of the largest Institutional Care providers in the UK.

This long-term arts project was an attempt to initiate care practices in order to test out attitudes between the management of such a Care Provider and a disabled self-organized group. The way to do that was to situate ourselves in the back-garden of such an organisation and to practice rituals of hospitality- such as drinking tea.

The project was in two parts:
The gradual establishment of a garden on disused land.
Its equally gradual erasure in a drawn out period of eviction.


Emergence and disappearance over time

What does it mean to be social? What does it mean to be non-social? To be contactable or non-contactable? These terms need to be played out beyond their determined boundaries so that the meanings emerge within the tempo of a particular organization, allowing at various intervals for one kind of flowering and another kind of foreshadowing. Where there are contradictions between differently combined organisations, tempos or agents, areas of interest emerge. That becomes an on-going spontaneous mapping that can’t be charted in advance.

The making and breaking of various sculptures in the garden seeks to mirror the even more gradual emergence and disappearance of the garden itself together with facets of memory, knowledge and conversation that come and go within the garden and in a wide network of associations triggered by the fact of there being a garden. Finally the garden as such becomes this constant playing out of appearances and disappearances and in itself ceases to matter.

Its final erasure is facilitated by the bureaucratic procedures of the Care provider who is employed to work for the garden to that end. This is how the garden becomes a space of interaction or transaction which for the purposes of its own end can hire the resources of a national organisation. It diverts practices of “high functionality” to the service of practices of “low functionality” in a parasitic way in order to question conditions of Use and nurture methods for a different kind of organisation of knowledge. This only unfolds in tangible, responsive and paired acts that are on-going. In that way the garden and the Care provider become associates.