How do we mourn while growing futures? In the midst of a polycrisis, what can art and culture offer? How can we redirect our creativity toward building care-informed infrastructures and frameworks to achieve positive social change?
Learning to Grow Learning to Grieve is an ongoing artistic research project exploring how regenerative growing practices—such as agroecological, regenerative, and natural farming, which support soil health, biodiversity, and healthy food—and grief-informed approaches—methods that help consciously engage with death, decay, and the process of naming and witnessing environmental and systemic loss—can intertwine and inform one another. Through situated, relational interventions in growing spaces and landscapes, I apply both these methods. Grief work, in particular, builds capacity to sit with complexity and discomfort, face uncertain futures and harmful pasts, and to hospice a dying system that modernity has wrought, in order to cultivate cultural practices rooted in connection rather than separation.
To explore the links between growing and grief-informed work, I am experimenting with developing soft scores that offer a space and invitation to name ecological and systemic grief and loss and to develop the capacity to listen and respond in care-informed approaches that invite complexity and a spectrum of emotional responses. This ongoing work values circular time as an alternative to linear, progress-oriented ways of thinking. Beyond ‘fixing’, certainty, and perfectionism, these creative improvisations might offer a means to metabolise other ways of becoming spatially aware and relational towards a collective imagination of possible futures. Thus each score encompasses guided actions or instructions that spark creative, emotional, or collaborative responses across a malleable timeline. They follow the rhythms and what emerges among all present bodies, including the more-than-human.
A soft score might ask one to engage with what is present, growing, ready for harvest, in need of support, or dying away. Each score uses what is at hand, invites attention, and asks those in attendance to listen and respond. To bring this to life, I have integrated artistic and cultural experimentation, such as engaging with materials and their transformation; harvesting and cooking; recipes for people and soil; co-regulation with the daily news; guided meditations; circle shares; collective mourning; exploratory walks; reading texts; drawing; journaling; and other activities that engage the collective imagination.
My allotment garden in Rotterdam South is one of the sites for this ongoing research. There I have cultivated a working ethos guided by an etymology of culture offered by fermentation expert Sandor Katz. Culture means cultivating ideas, customs, and social behaviour, as well as bacteria and plants. This working principle was developed together with an informal network in Rotterdam called Learning Grounds, which includes artists, cultural workers, researchers, and gardeners. Through hands-on activities in green spaces, the informal network proposes alternatives to infrastructures of separation. With scalable acts, we can cultivate new ways of living and relating, shift understandings of culture, and its role in growing futures.
Part of this practice is based on a genealogy of training, mentorship and other experiences in collective resonance in grief work (Tobi Ayé), embodied activism (rae johnson), contemplative end-of-life care (Institute of Traditional Medicine), depth education and decolonial futures (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures), among others.
For more references: https://www.transformativepedagogy.net
Photography by Michelle Teran
