This post is not exactly about reading books, although books are present, but about reading an installation and a major art event through the lens of permaculture. The photo above is from the project Unpacking My Library at the 57th Venice Biennale. Inspired by Walter Benjiamin’s 1931 essay, this project allowed all participating artists (including dead […]

We read Jessica Barnes entry ‘Gluten’ in the Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen, published by Cultural Anthropology. Barnes begins with a deceptively simple question: what does the Anthropocene taste like? This is an excellent starting point to imagine a series of material, semiotic, and sensory entanglements and assemblages generated in the Anthropocene (if we want […]

This is a short documentation of the first Mapping Edges walk around Marrickville while in residence at Frontyard in March 2016. It shows some key elements of our methodology: we walk slowly, and analyse plant life and the way plants design the urban environment. Also it often rains.

We are researching home gardens in Haberfield, to map, document and showcase the neighbourhood’s cultural diversity through interviews with gardeners and photographs of gardens.

We presented a paper at the conference Tropics of the Imagination in Singapore last week, and took occasion to think through what kind of tropical imaginaries are generated by plants. We started by locating our work in Gadigal country, specifically in Marrickville, explained our methodology, introduced which tropical tropes are associated with plants, and concluded following […]

The edge of Sydney Park is about to be destroyed by WestConnex. We took photos of trees marked for demolition and visited the camp.

I am in Venice, and I am posting from a garden on the island of Giudecca. It is best described as a series of four gardens, each on the site of plots of land with their own plant history. These histories are layered through the current design, from the layout of old orchards, to a vegetable […]