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A commitment to our shared destiny: transformational gardens and a vision of equity

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A commitment to our shared destiny: transformational gardens and a vision of equity

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A COMMITMENT TO OUR SHARED DESTINY:
TRANSFORMATIONAL GARDENS AND A VISION OF EQUITY

by

Allison Danielle Behrstock

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Allison Danielle Behrstock

ii

Table of Contents
Abstract …………………………………………………………………………. iii
Introduction ……………………………………………………………………… 1
Chapter 1: Edible Action: A Community Takes Responsibility ……………….. 12
Chapter 2: Creative Predecessors and Contemporaries ………………………... 27
Chapter 3: La Semeuse …………………………………………………………. 41
Conclusion: Thresh, Harvest, Compost ………………………………………... 59
Bibliography ……………………...……………………………………………. 66

iii

Abstract
A growing need to address sustainable agriculture and food security has
influenced cultural producers to embrace gardening as social practice. Gardening spaces
are engaged environments that foster new ways of relating; they are places in which
biodiversity and cultural diversity are experienced as interdependent; and they nurture
embodied knowledge in ways that breaks down a centuries old binary between nature and
culture. Proposing that such sites be called “transformational gardens,” this text addresses
three of them: The South Central Farm/s, Bonnie Ora Sherk’s Crossroads Community
(The Farm), and Marjetica Potrc’s La Semeuse. As we expand our ideas of cultural
production, these projects fit into an emerging global discourse that invests in social and
ecological justice to dispel oppressive hierarchies, reframing our definitions of art.

1

Introduction
One enters into community not by affirming oneself and one’s forces but by
exposing oneself to expenditure at a loss, to sacrifice. Community forms in a
movement by which one exposes oneself to the other, to forces and powers
outside oneself, to death and to the others who die.
1

The challenges of the global future – ecological degradation, resource scarcity,
population migration, and economic collapse – require that we develop more
environmentally and socially sustainable ways to organize ourselves and relate to one
another locally and transnationally. In a world stretched by violence and greed, this text
explores model projects that instrumentalize gardening to reknit a ruptured social contract
and generate new social relations and political situations.
Within the physical and social space of what I will call a “transformational
garden,” participation can be said to help form a new social contract based on mutuality,
which, by its inhabitants’ unique embodiment, advances cultural production. Artist
Marjetica Potrc states: “Initiatives like this can help change governments’ point of view.
We need change, but for now it comes more from confrontation than from a desire to
work together.”
2
At the same time, the experience of being part of such a garden is

1
Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Champaign-
Urbana: Indiana University Press, 1994), 12.

2
“Conversation Between Gilles Clément, Marjetica Potrc, and Guilain Roussel,” Le Journal des
Laboratories, trans. Kate Davis, accessed Jan. 18, 2012,
http://www.leslaboratoires.org/en/article/conversation-gilles-cl-ment/la-semeuse-ou-le-devenir-
indig-ne.

2

believed to strengthen what esteemed journalist and author Ken Wiwa describes as “a
world based on mutual respect and the recognition of our shared destiny.”
3

Our times have no lack of the opposite. In particular, they are beset by the
outright disposability of bodies; by which I mean the perception and use of bodies –
human, animal, and seed – as an expendable resource in the pursuit of limitless growth
and profit. The construction that limitless growth is possible secures power and privilege
for a small proportion of the world’s population at the expense of the majority. In the
process of maintaining the ensuing hierarchy, a hegemony that threatens cultural
traditions and species diversity is normalized. The negation of a body’s import, the
valuing of wealth over people, defines and maintains a contemporary global economic
system that is inherently inequitable, hierarchical, and calibrated to its own perpetuation.
This idea is well expressed by philosopher, revolutionary and writer Franz Fanon:
“imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove
from our land but from our minds as well.”
Such rot is vast and includes the expression of “value” as a narrow pursuit of
wealth. The result is neglect of the welfare of people and the environment, in addition to
the maintenance of a condition of violence. The social relations attendant to this system
that arise from such an understanding of value, fracture our collective body, subject many
to oppression, and diminish understanding of our interdependence with nature. Myriad
conditions are endemic to this continuum: hunger, xenophobia, alienation, divisions

3
Ken Wiwa is the son of the slain Nigerian activist and environmental leader Saro Wiwa, who
struggled to protect his country from multinational interests in Nigeria’s rich oil reserves.
“Remember Saro-Wiwa,” in LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecologry Handbook, ed. Max Andrews
(London: The RSA, 2006), 99.

3

between gender, classes, generations, and countries. Iconic poet Gil Scott Heron
described this succinctly when he wrote: “when it comes to people’s safety/money wins
out every time.”
4

Rather than a byproduct, such alienation from self, other, and nature is essential
for preventing the opposition and change that would otherwise alter the status quo. The
capacity to stimulate and support the transformation of personal experiences of
oppression, and to challenge systemic inequities, is central to three gardens that I will
propose are transformational. This text will explore and address how such
“transformational gardens” foster ameliorative, restorative processes to meet
simultaneous crises and prominent opportunities.
Does a transformational garden support sustainability, and propel socio-cultural
and socio-political transformation? How does a community driven example of a
transformational garden, in a global city, parallel and encourage similar efforts to support
sustainability and propel transformation in the arts? This text examines such questions
and seeks to explore and provide answers through analysis of the South Central Farm
(1994 – 2006) in Los Angeles, an enterprise that was originally suggested by local
activist Doris Bloch and embraced by local residents; Crossroads Community (The
Farm), 1974 – 1980, organized in San Francisco by artist Bonnie Ora Sherk, which was
not recognized as an art project by the cultural elite at the time; and La Semeuse ou le
devenir indigéne (2011 – ongoing), a transformational garden in the form of an art
project, that has been initiated on the outskirts of Paris by artist Marjetica Potrc. As a

4
Gil Scott Heron, “Almost Lost Detroit.” This song was performed at the No Nukes concerts in
1977.

4

result of such an examination, we can “consider how an abstraction like democracy might
manifest itself in physical, even aesthetic forms.”
5

Any garden anywhere can provide the conditions for personal and collective
transformation, however the capacity for transformational gardens to contribute to the
creation of a less hierarchical, more horizontal expansion of self-determination is distinct.
Transformational gardens are learning environments where pedagogy occurs in the
practical application of the garden as resource, tool and actualizer of social change.
Transformational gardens are situated within and contribute to an evolving art historical
discourse. As taken up in this text, La Semeuse, Crossroads Community (The Farm), and
The South Central Farm propose effective actions for making transformational gardens,
which work to advance and beneficially contribute to a more verdant, just, and caring
society.
Transformational gardens exist across a spectrum of political significance. The
form and expression of the garden varies according to context and collaborators, yet each
creates a space within which a person, and his or her physical body and self can feel safe,
welcomed, and may find a place for sustenance. Transformational gardens work with
nature, to respect limited resources and people’s role as stewards. The garden is an ally,
tended with care, and may provide space for marginalized publics who do not have
access to their own land to grow food, or to foster seeds and plants in a communal space.
Transformational gardens might offer more equitable access to food that nourishes bodies

5
Gregory Sholette, “After OWS: Social Practice, Art, Abstraction, and the Limits of the Social,”
e-flux 31 (Jan. 2012), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/after-ows-social-practice-art-abstraction-
and-the-limits-of-the-social/.

5

and supports people’s minds to flourish. Unemployment is at such a staggering level in
the world now, wages can be insufficient even with long work hours, and hunger is a real
problem. In low-income communities fresh produce can be especially hard to come by.
6

As with every garden, companionship can be gained from sharing time in the
garden and allows for positive socialization that lessens alienation, away from the
television and digital forms of entertainment that necessitate patterns of consumption.
Verily, putting ones hands in the soil has been shown to build immunity and allay
depression, too.
7
Gardens can provide a healing refuge for those in need of balm for
wounds hard to articulate, or a reprieve from daily stress, where belonging is gained
simply from being there.
8
This includes immigrants, who may not speak the primary local
language, who have survived hardship and are still enduring hardship in a new country.
Transformational gardens create spaces for renewal, in which people are
understood, and understand one another, as sovereign individuals, with dignity in
diversity. At a time of increasing pressure towards cultural and horticultural
homogeneity, the biological diversity of transformational gardens also reflects the
importance of this cultural diversity. The gardens endeavor to maneuver through a taut

6
The Free Breakfast for School Children Program began in 1969 in Oakland, California, and was
sponsored by the Black Panther Party to help young black students. It was very successful and
spread to other cities, and was adopted into what became the National School Breakfast Program,
which feeds ten million children a day, and the National School Lunch Program, which feeds
over thirty million.

7
Rob Paterson, “Dirt is mainly good for you – especially for children,” The Missing Human
Manual website, accessed Jan. 21, 2012, http://missinghumanmanual.com/?p=822.

8
In the United States, studies have shown that rates of post-traumatic stress are as high for inner-
city populations as they are for vets returning from war.

6

political landscape via the accessible pleasure of communing in nature, something that is
itself radical within the urban ghetto, with the implementation of dynamic, creative
programming. These are elements of transformational gardens that can empower
individual and collective voice and pride, and encourage action to better one’s own life
and, therefore, that of the community.
As such, transformational gardens can be understood as an important healing tool
in the world. The interrelated conditions in which they arise address the centuries old
bifurcation of nature and culture that remains pervasive from colonial thought.
9
The
hierarchies imposed through this historical violence extend to elevate a narrow version of
culture, and may do so very profitably within global markets. While the involvement of
the arts is important, transformational gardens need not only be artistic projects to be
recognized for their importance within a changing cultural landscape. Whether seen as a
community garden or an art project, or both, a transformational garden bears a cultural
role by providing a new experience of the social. There is an intentional construction of
context in which relatedness and sociability emerge to collectively create meaning –
whether viewed as art or a community garden. Within the container of a transformational

9
Within “colonial thought,” a dominion over people and land was justified as, in effect, both
were colonized. The complexities of a schism between nature and culture remain in people’s
minds, however, as reflected in a recent report detailing the challenges of putting the environment
on equal footing as human rights (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/10-5). Dr. Myra
J. Hird also looks at this schism in a 2010 article titled “Coevolution, Symbiosis, and Sociology.”
Hird writes: “Most sociological analyses adhere to the Western bifurcation of nature and culture,
hampering analyses of ecology. Pressing ecological crises invite sociologists to engage with
ecology in new ways” (Ecological Economics 69 [2010]: 737-742). Current ecological crises,
which threaten both people and the environment, provide an opportunity to reexamine the false
nature/culture binary, originally created to promulgate hierarchies and maintain power through
oppressive measures.

7

garden, artists are not presenting themselves as redeemers, or saviors, from the realm of
culture. Such a misconceived pretense would validate an egregious hierarchy that the
transformational garden works to dispel.
While gardens that are designed as ornamental, highly aestheticized spaces for a
passive reverie may be enjoyable and significant in their own right, the phenomenon of
gardens as aestheticized space has reflected a narrow experience of ‘nature’ and,
historically, been an important and subtle aspect of social engineering intended to mollify
class inequalities. In Victorian England, for example, the “moral geography of the public
park was….intended to ‘improve’ the park users and encourage local pride and
patriotism.”
10
Municipal parks, such as Victoria Park in the East End of London,
welcomed a pastoral nature and, yet, this precedent backfired when this and other parks
became sites for organized protest and activism. The descriptive language, above, relating
to Victoria Park’s emergence, glosses over a wish to conscript park users into a passive
obedience to hierarchies present, while posing as civic generosity.
As a realm of inquiry, growing food and gardening have been present in an art
historical discourse although in what could be viewed as a marginalized orb of practice.
Portable Orchard: Survival Piece #5 is a project from the creative team of Helen and

10
George McKay, Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden (London:
Frances Lincoln Limited, 2011), 14.

8

Newton Harrison that involved growing an orchard in a California gallery in 1972 – 73.
11

At the time it was exhibited, this durational project helped to articulate a collapse
between nature and culture. Ten years later, artist Agnes Denes produced her iconic
Wheatfield - A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, downtown Manhattan, 2 acres of
wheat planted and harvested, 1982 (1982). The wheat grown was visible in a two-acre
vacant landfill in New York, surrounded on one side by skyscrapers and across the water
from the Statue of Liberty. Denes explained that neither her enormous efforts and labor
nor those of generous volunteers were compensated, but the project resulted from other
than monetary motivations.
12
The visual and cultural landscape was powerfully altered by
the work, and her statement has been documented and widely circulated.
These examples fit into discourse that is complex, nuanced, and still emerging. The
aestheticization of gardening is part of a conversation that falls both inside and outside of
what is viewed as art. Arguably, it is a messy conversation; particularly when a
historically neat division between “nature” and “culture” has positioned the two in
separate and exclusive realms, and perpetuated disastrous hierarchies. For that reason, a
complexification of the dichotomy, “nature” and “culture” and the ensuing “messiness,”
are worth tussling with.

11
Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, Portable Orchard, 1972–73. The installation is
documented on the Harrisons’ website, accessed Jan. 10, 2012,
http://theharrisonstudio.net/?page_id=214.

12
Agnes Denes, lecture presented at the Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice,
New York, NY, Nov. 12-13, 2010. Video documentation of Denes’s lecture is archived on the
Creative Time Summit website, accessed Jan. 10, 2012,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/2010/10/10/agnes-denes/.

9

We may view saving seeds and growing edibles as challenging a diseased food
system that subjugates nature and its workers, contaminates the environment – soil,
water, air – and exposes people’s bodies to toxic chemicals and other unsafe conditions
for labor. Active participation in the food production process allows for a literal
transformation in one’s relationship to agricultural production, an entrenched global
system that causes immense destruction. Taking responsibility for production also helps
to address fundamental relations of power, specifically, the separation between people in
economic and racial hierarchies. This could be construed as decolonizing knowledge and
power. Strengthening food sovereignty and enabling the cultivation of foods that affirm
cultural identity subverts the contemporary corporatized agricultural landscape, and
offers support to the racialized and religious other, including immigrants, at a time of
heightened fear and repressive state policy in the United States and Europe.
Corporatized agriculture has become synonymous with genetically modified
organisms, or GMOs, which are patented seeds engineered in a laboratory, and the
extensive use of harsh chemicals. Evidence would suggest that the health of both people
and the planet are endangered by agribusiness practices.
13
Because GMO foods are not
labeled, they offer a literal example of one way in which self-determination is being
curtailed and the world is hierarchicized. Personal freedoms are reduced as a result. Some
can afford to spend time researching, have access to food choices, and the financial
means to protect themselves, and others are not equitably so. Proceeding

13
For a discussion of the production of soy, for instance, in the Brazilian Amazon after clear
cutting, see Scott Wallace, “Farming the Amazon,” National Geographic Online, accessed Dec.
10, 2011, http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/last-of-amazon/.

10

with precaution, GMO seeds have been banned in more countries in the last year yet not
the United States.
14

American artist and writer Claire Pentecost states: “Do I believe Monsanto’s
scientifically based claim that pesticides and transgenic foods are safe to ingest, and
controllable in the environment?” She continues by questioning the governmental
agencies sworn to oversee this corporation: “Do I trust United States Department of
Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency and Food & Drug Administration systems
of review and approval for new technologies?” The answer, she shares, is no. “More and
more, I have access to evidence that authoritative knowledge, speaking for us, serves
itself first. The rest of us are collateral damage in the war of profit making.”
15

I chose each of the following three transformational gardens based on my
connection and personal relationship with them. This haptic knowledge is mine from
experiences over time, a way of knowing that is not usually institutionally validated or
recognized within academia. There are certainly other brilliant artists who are working
with gardening, and exceptional urban farming projects, that I could have used in this
text, however I knew the three I’ve chosen best. I visited the South Central Farm in its
first incarnation, and was able to meet and talk with farmers there and later in doing more

14
For a discussion of GMO foods in the United States and Europe, see Mark Bittman, “Why
Aren’t GMO Food’s Labeled,” New York Times Opinionater blog, Mar. 15, 2011,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/why-arent-g-m-o-foods-labeled/. For a
discussion of a recent proposal to ban GMO rice in China, see Monica Tan, “China Drafts Legal
Proposal to Completely Shut Down GE Rice,” Green Peace Pacific Australia blog, Feb. 22,
2012, http://www.greenpeace.org.au/blog/?p=4559.

15
Claire Pentecost, “The Public Amateur,” Pentecost’s The Public Amateur blog, Jan. 18, 2009,
http://publicamateur.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/beyond-face/#more-34.

11

research for this text. I was able to have lunch with Bonnie Ora Sherk after she graciously
spoke to me at length over the phone. I lived in Aubervilliers for a month, and spent that
time at Les Laboratoires supporting the foundational work for La Semeuse.
I’ve met, heard lecture, and read about various other artists who work with urban
gardening, however I didn’t have the same vernacular familiarity with their practices.
This text comes from an embodied understanding, which I have endeavored to weave
together with more traditional research methods. I would like the text to be accessible
across disciplinary boundaries, and serve a larger discourse in activist circles as well as
the arts. I value the opportunities I have had to learn and share a dialogue with diverse
colleagues and allies, and to collaborate with people whose practices I admire greatly.
When approaching this text, it became evident that what I know in my body is a
legitimate authorial voice, something which each of us has, can share and can act upon,
without external validation.

12

Chapter 1
Edible Action: A Community Takes Responsibility

The South Central Farm was the largest urban farm in the United States for a
bright period in South Central, Los Angeles (1994 – 2006). While outside the purview of
the arts, the South Central Farm is a transformational garden that may serve a global
discourse around urban farming, an activity which has recently become aestheticized and
institutionalized as an emerging field of interest in the arts. South Central Los Angeles
has long been associated with poverty, gangs, and police brutality in the public
imaginary.
16
However one wouldn’t have felt that inside a thriving, sprawling 14-acre
farm, which was a sanctuary for those working the land and the neighboring community
around 41
st
and Alameda.
17
To understand its origins in the civic life of South Central, the
South Central Farm was initially given to the neighborhood – “District 9” – as a
conciliatory gesture after the infamous violence and destruction of the Los Angeles Riots
in 1992.

16
See, for instance, Matea Gold and Greg Baxton, “Considering South-Central by Another
Name,” the Los Angeles Times Online, Apr. 10, 2003,
http://articles.latimes.com/2003/apr/10/local/me-socentral10. The article states that: “The Los
Angeles City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to replace the term ‘South-Central Los
Angeles’ with ‘South Los Angeles’ on city documents and signs, a move supporters said would
help erase a stigma that has dogged the southern part of the city. After the vote, several local
television stations said they would follow the city's lead and eliminate the use of ‘South-Central’
in news reports. Despite that, some city officials suggested that the name change would do little
to address the underlying social ills that have fed the perception of South-Central as depressed
and crime-ridden.”

17
Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s award-winning documentary, The Garden (2008), conveys well this
sense of the place; my own on-site visits to the Farm repeatedly confirmed this sensation.

13

These riots are also referred to as the Los Angeles Civil Unrest to better
distinguish them from other previous riots. They spanned six days of looting, resulted in
56 deaths, and property damage that cost the City $1 billion. The riots could be
understood as an expression of the peoples’ feeling of betrayal, abandonment, and
hopelessness after the Rodney King verdict. A predominantly white jury, without a single
black juror, acquitted three white and one Latino officer for brutally beating King, a black
motorist, following a high-speed pursuit. This verdict seemed to be a tipping point for the
community, after years of enduring the indignities of regular intimidation and violence by
legal authorities. In fact, the Los Angeles Police Department’s tactics, and corruption,
were deemed so severe that the Federal Government placed them under a Consent Decree
in 1999.
18

It is of great importance that Los Angeles police were put under external
supervision in this manner, as it corroborated the extensive injustices to which people of
color in Los Angeles, concentrated in low-income communities, had been routinely
subject. The failure to provide protection under the law, and the hypocrisy of authorities
that are meant “to protect and serve,” could rightly be seen amidst other grave inequities.
For example, the discouragement of a shattered public school system and environs
lacking in basic amenities, also manifestations of cycles of economic and systemic
neglect and ways that structural violence can be perpetuated daily.

18
Laura Conaway, “Judge Frees LAPD from ‘Rampart Scandal’ Consent Decree,” National
Public Radio’s The Two-Way blog, Jul. 20, 2009, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2009/07/judge_frees_lapd_from_rampart.html.

14

Some years earlier, in 1986, the City of Los Angeles had used eminent domain to
acquire the 14 acres of land that became the Farm. The land was purchased from nine
different owners for a total of $4,786,372, with the clear intention to build a waste-to-
energy incinerator there.
19
In response, local residents created the group Concerned
Citizens of South Central (CCSC) to stop the incinerator being built in their
neighborhood. Their efforts successfully overturned the City’s planned objective in
1987.
20
According to CCSC, this was the first time an incinerator planned for a low-
income community of color had ever been stopped in this country. CCSC demonstrated a
refusal to be subject to a type of environmental violence that has become normalized in
low-income communities of color, a type of colonial thinking that imposes hierarchies
and makes it more acceptable to negatively impact the health of certain bodies, over
others, as part of its exercise of power.
The Academy Award nominated documentary film about the South Central Farm,
aptly named The Garden, chronicles how subsequent to the damage and instability
following the civil unrest, local activist Doris Bloch advocated that the land be gifted as
garden plots to residents. Bloch, a local Angelena and the daughter of a super market
tycoon, has a resume that includes helping build the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank to
become one of the Nation’s largest. She watched the city turn into what she saw

19
Wikipedia’s “South Central Farm” entry, accessed Dec. 10, 2011,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Central_Farm.

20
Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles website, accessed Dec. 10, 2011,
http://www.ccscla.org/.

15

resemble, in her own words, “third-world” conditions.
21
After the King verdict, it seems
plausible that the destruction that resulted exposed the despair within the community, that
people were protesting a covert war being waged in their neighborhood, even before
experiencing the dramatic militarization when the National Guard was called in.
22

The Garden records how the community was invited to sign up for a portion of
the land on a first come basis. The demographics of the neighborhood had shifted
considerably in a short time since the riots, and the majority of the population in South
Central was now Latino. As a result, most of the approximately 400 plots were
distributed to Latino families.
23
In its original glory the South Central Farm was a thriving
garden and community space, which supported Latino youth, families and elders as well
as their food traditions. Healthy food was accessible locally and a weekly farmer’s
market welcomed everyone. As described by Devon G. Peña, Professor of Anthropology
at the University of Washington, the South Central Farm was:
…a space where indigenous women cultivate heirloom crops and weave visions
and memories of their cultural identity and heritage into the landscape. They are
making place; they are making home. Imagine the passing of their knowledge to
the next generation in memories of plant stories and the social and ecological
skills of the farmer. Imagine youth eagerly assisting with the cultivation of
heirloom maíz, frijol, calabaza, guayaba, chipilin, and chilacayote. Imagine youth

21
Emily Green, “LA’s First Lady of Hunger Relief,” Los Angeles Times Online, Mar. 22, 2000,
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/mar/22/food/fo-11303.

22
A helpful definition of war: A state of armed conflict between different nations or states or
different groups within a nation or state [italics mine]. Google.com, accessed Feb. 1, 2012.

23
Alice M. Walton, “Budget Committee Swaps Land for Park Improvements in South LA,” The
City Maven blog, Oct. 24, 2011, http://www.thecitymaven.com/2011/10/24/budget-committee-
swaps-land-for-park-improvements-in-south-l-a/.

16

who know hundreds of wild and cultivated plants, their nutritional and medicinal
properties, and what it takes to grow them naturally.
24

To those working the land or simply visiting, the South Central Farm evidenced
“a vibrant space filled with social life and buzzing with the moral density that comes with
sustained conviviality.”
25
It remains a model of collaboration and local food sovereignty
worthy of replication and close examination.
26
What is food sovereignty? This concept
merges local food security with the notion, in Professor Peña’s words, that “food sources
are consistent with cultural identities and involve community networks that promote self-
reliance and mutual aid.”
27
This definition encapsulates the empowerment of the
grassroots, supporting the preservation of cultural traditions and identities, strengthened
through solidarity, that resist hierarchical denigration or oppression.
The South Central Farm included native peoples of Mixtec, Tojolobal, Triqui,
Tzeltal, Yaqui, and Zapotec descent.
28
Many of the farmers did not speak English, and
few, if any, had access to a garden. The land provided a rare and inviting space in a
challenging urban environment for calm, cultivation, restoration and intergenerational
gathering. The South Central Farm also brought people together and with very little
financial means was able to produce a lush edible landscape, where people flourished too.

24
Devon G. Peña, “Farmers Feeding Families: Agroecology in South Central Los Angeles,”
Keynote address presented to the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies,
Washington State University, Pullman, WA, Mar. 4, 2006.

25
Peña, “Farmers Feeding Families.”

26
I formed this impression after viewing Scott Hamilton’s documentary The Garden (2008).

27
Peña, “Farmers Feeding Families.”

28
Peña, “Farmers Feeding Families.”

17

The South Central Farm could be seen to reflect what French botanist, gardener, and
writer Gilles Clément would call “The Planetary Garden,” which seeks:
‘to do as much as possible, with, and as little as possible against’…to pursue
development of maximum diversity without destroying it [as corporatized
agriculture threatens to with monocultures and GMOs]. The goal is how to
continue to make the planetary ‘machine’ function, how to make the garden live
and, therefore, the gardener as well.
29

Although the South Central Farm proved to be a very successful endeavor, in
2004 the land it cultivated was sold back to Ralph Horowitz, one of its original nine
owners, for $5 million. Slowly evidence surfaced that the sale had involved District 9
Councilwoman Jan Perry and the full support of Concerned Citizens of South Central,
under the directorship of Jaunita Tate. That another local community group would turn on
the Farm was rumored to be indicative of deep racial tensions in the neighborhood,
between Latinos and African Americans, yet the Farmers resist this interpretation, instead
citing their receptivity to forming solidarity across race and class.
The South Central Farmers spent three years in and out of court, constantly
researching, organizing and leading a grassroots campaign to save the land. These efforts
were lead by two Farmers in particular, Tezozomoc and Rufina Juarez. Benefit concerts
with such famous musicians as Rage Against the Machine were held, and then, in what
looked like victory, the farmers eventually secured the backing of the Annenberg
Foundation to buy the land back from Horowitz. Funds were made available to meet
Horowitz’s stated price of $16.3 million, over three times his purchasing price.

29
Gilles Clément, “Guidelines for the Planetary Garden,” in Planetary Gardens: The Landscape
Architecture of Gilles Clément, ed. Alessandro Rocca (Milan: 22publishing, 2007), 45.

18

In what for many was a tragedy, this victory for the farmers proved insufficient.
Unexpectedly, Horowitz withdrew his offer and the Farmers were evicted in 2006, by
force of police, and the garden plots were bulldozed. Committed to their vision and a
struggle that continues, the Farmers relocated to Fresno, where a private individual
supporter – an organic almond grower – gifted them land. The commute proved too
difficult however, and the Farmers moved to Bakersfield a year later, where land was
purchased through donations and the work of their non-profit, a 501 c3, The South
Central Farm Health and Education Fund.
The land in South Central has continued to go through various stages of legal
proceedings under Horowitz ownership. Clothing company Forever 21 had been
interested in building factories there but discontinued their proceedings after the
community protested and 400 signatures were presented in opposition. While the City
had previously agreed that 2.7 acres of the Farm would be made into a park after the
Farm’s demise, it subsequently cited zoning and environmental impact reports as reasons
not to proceed in that direction. That acreage has since been sold to Horowitz, who now
has 14 rather than 11 acres to sell, or lease, for further profit.
Today, the Farmers work 50 acres of land and successfully sell their organic
produce through The South Central Farmers’ Cooperative (SCFC), a sustainable
business. The weekly or monthly produce of this community supported agriculture
program (CSA) can be picked up at sites that include farmers’ markets, universities, and
mom and pop corner markets, and sells to restaurants. The SCFC has also partnered with
the East LA organization La Causa to help small markets undergo healthier makeovers,

19

as well as host cooking classes.
30
The sale of fresh produce cycles back into helping fund
the South Central Farmers Health and Education Fund, previously mentioned, the
Farmers’ non-profit organization that promotes advocacy for urban and rural organic
agriculture. Excess food from the SCFC is also donated to various shelters, further
benefitting the local community. The infrastructure the farmers are invested in building
helps to distribute and feed thousands of people healthy food, which they consider a basic
human right.
31

Alfredo Tlotoa, an undergraduate student whose family has been committed to the
Farm and its struggle since they had a plot in South Central, recently told me: “our
community built something amazing.” He pointed out that all that was accomplished
came as a result of the cultural diversity in their community, and that the health of
individuals and the community was intertwined, as a result of “taking control of what we
eat, creating an autonomy that was very unique.” Tlotoa asserted that every individual
involved in the Farm provided political power and consciousness and was integral to the
process of achieving autonomy. He shared his opinion that people pay more attention to
“land than people working it” yet that it is “people who create the magic.”
32

30
Low-income neighborhoods where the landscape is dominated by fast food chains, without any
supermarkets, are referred to as “food deserts.” A social justice issue, a lack of available fresh
produce undermines residents’ health.

31
Alberto Tlotoa, discussion with the author at the South Central Farmers’ Hollywood Farmer’s
Market location, Mar. 4, 2012.

32
This same argument is made in the book Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves,
and the Hidden History of American Conservation, which details the founding of North
America’s national parks. The authors describe the ways in which new laws displaced indigenous
people and other residents from a traditional way of life interdependent with nature – a way of

20

To this day, the South Central Farm remains one of the largest working urban
farms in the country, and its perpetuation and continuation on new land, and capable
transition towards supporting organic farming and a thriving local economy in the Los
Angeles Area, has kept it current within an evolving discussion about sustainable
urbanism. The South Central Farm raises important questions about community gardens,
public space, and civic life, as well as the crucial need for land to be secured where
people may feel respected, safe, seen, valued and supported – because the dominant
culture does not provide such land or adequate respect towards the needs of low-income
communities of color.
In doing research on crime statistics before, during and after the South Central
Farm was bulldozed, I reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department for assistance.
After a number of conversations, I was directed to Jose Ibarra-Virgen who works for the
City of Los Angeles on gang prevention and homicide. Seeking to collect more personal
data within the community, he kindly helped arrange a visit for me to meet with women
who lived near the South Central Farm location. Our meeting place was Ross Snyder, a
local park and recreation center that has become a bustling gathering place and has
improved drastically since Mayor Villagarosa began the gang-prevention program
Summer Night Lights in 2008 – just two years after the South Central Farm was

life that had actually helped maintain homeostasis – in the service of preserving a man-made,
idealized image of nature.

21

bulldozed.
33
Speaking with the women at Ross Snyder, they lamented that the area where
the farm used to be no longer feels as safe to walk around. And in the South Central
Farm’s absence, there is less access to purchase healthy food in the neighborhood.
The South Central Farmers tended the land and cultivated food, and acted as
stewards for a lifestyle that materialized in and through growing crops. The farmers
adopted the saying “tierra y vida” – “land and life” – which expresses that life comes
from respecting the land. They understood that the struggle for land and autonomy is
central to the existence of their families and themselves. As the early history of the land
that became the South Central Farm indicates, poor communities of color and indigenous
peoples have been expected to tolerate the pollution generated from industry,
incinerators, garbage dumps, etc. Land all over the world continues to be possessed by
corporations intent on building dams, installing pipelines, mining, clear-cutting, grazing
cattle, fracking, and other questionable industries that damage ecosystems and wildlife
habitats, or are highly polluting, yet, typically, are represented as supporting the public
interest and building jobs.
In South America, for example, land grabs to grow crops for export have plagued
the continent. According to journalist Naomi Klein in her acclaimed book, Disaster
Capitalism, under the influence of the Chicago school of economics, US backed coups
helped to install brutal military dictatorships, which gave US corporations better access to
foreign soil and less expensive labor. This proved highly advantageous for flooding the

33
Summer Night Lights was an incredibly successful gang prevention program that targeted the
toughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles by offering creative programming in local parks, literally
keeping the lights on at night and providing activities and food to all.

22

market with produce grown inexpensively, at the expense and suffering of people who
were dismissed as expendable. The influx of goods from the so-called Banana Republics
was grown, literally, over bloodshed. In Klein’s words: “Some of the most infamous
human rights violations…have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-
democratic regimes, were in fact…actively harnessed to prepare the ground for radical
free-market “reforms.””
34

Working for wages is distinct from working and begetting nourishment. Klein’s
research states that global capitalism preys on people’s survival needs, and when work
conditions are harsh, even toxic, money can make the associated risks endurable for
many. The valuation of a body as a replaceable, inessential commodity, which manifests
in a lack of standards to protect workers, sheds light on the ability to discard a person, the
very disposability of bodies, within capitalism. There are always more workers, and there
are always more people in need of a paycheck. In comparison, the South Central
Farmers’ labor can be correlated to nurturance of self and other, to beautifying and
improving community, and shifting focus from greed and consumption to a less taxing
existence in consort with nature.
It could be argued that the South Central Farm allowed for the integrity of labor
within a new constellation of meaning, which transforms the worker and the product, as
well as the cultural values present, into far greater coefficients than any money produced.
And money was not the foci of the South Central Farm, though a little was raised, surely,
when some farmers sold their produce or traditional prepared foods at weekend farmers’

34
Naomi Klein, introduction to The Shock Doctrine (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2007), excerpted on
Klein’s website, accessed Dec. 8, 2011, http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/excerpt.

23

markets. These small earnings helped those families, and all who received the benefit of
their cultivation and comida.
35
While engaging with local politics, to save their land from
development, the farmers took their values into the public eye and received a great
amount of press and media attention, which increased awareness about urban farming and
community gardening and their impressive activism.
Evidence suggests that the South Central Farm was a boon to those inside and
outside its perimeter. To understand this from another perspective I spoke with Detective
Rudy Pichardo, in charge of Strategic Crime Analysis for Los Angeles.
36
Without
speaking specifically about conditions before and after the Farm, Detective Pichardo
shared his perspective on environmental design and crime prevention. When a
neighborhood looks dirty, he argued, to the residents it may seem like nobody cares, and
that neglect is acutely felt: “There’s a disorder to the community when there’s no
caretakers,” he said. We discussed how the South Central Farm provided visible,
dedicated caretakers for an important stretch of time.
Detective Pichardo emphasized that lasting solutions are not the responsibility of
law enforcement alone: “We can’t arrest our way out of all these social problems, it has
to be a community effort.” He described the importance of pleasant aesthetics – such as
parks and gardens – in helping to reduce crime. He expressed that when a community
invests in beautification efforts, including green spaces, it is possible to create a safe,
shared space that gangs are less likely to own as their “turf.” Detective Pichardo

35
The Spanish word comida means food in English.

36
Rudy Pichardo, interview with the author, Jan. 27, 2012.

24

expressed empathy for people trying to survive, and fearing crime in their own
neighborhoods. He differentiated between a reduction in crime and its erasure, and until
its erasure people can’t feel safe or take their children out. As a result, the community
becomes alienated from what could be its public space. Detective Pichardo maintained
that his thoughts about utilizing environmental design to assist crime prevention grew out
of years on the job, and reached into topics typically considered the purview of the City’s
Building, Planning and Safety departments.
Corroborating Detective Pichardo’s lived experience, Matthew Crawford, a senior
management analyst and the top budget analyst for the City of Los Angeles, shared that
while an active, engaged police presence may help to create greater local safety, it is
those “brave souls” who live in the area that must maintain their neighborhoods own
livability from within.
37
He explained that unfortunately people do not trust the police
readily as a result, in Crawford’s words, of the City’s decision to spend the “better part of
thirty years trying to run a military as a police force.”
38
Crawford explained, that although
the previous Chief of Police, Bill Bratton, and current chief Charlie Beck, have
demonstrated different philosophical approaches, the militarization of the LAPD has
weakened the faith of communities in uniformed officers as a source of support and
collaboration in crime prevention, while also stimulating an inter-generational problem
that itself requires healing.

37
Matthew Crawford, interview with the author, Jan. 30, 2012.

38
“Consent Decree Overview,” Los Angeles Police Department website, accessed Jan. 29, 2012,
http://lapdonline.org/search_results/content_basic_view/928.

25

Since becoming the Mayor of Los Angeles in 2005, Antonio Villaraigosa has
delivered on a popular campaign promise and hired almost one thousand new police
officers. While statistics show that violent crime in Los Angeles has been reduced,
Crawford explained that the entire nation has experienced similar reductions without
anywhere near the same expenditure on policing. Crawford’s conclusion is that other
factors, including social programs, are largely responsible, and that the successes
Villaigorasa is claiming are actually far more nuanced. Crawford believes that “growing
community,” as he put it, resides in having third parties take the lead, in collaboration
with police and invested community groups. Such partnerships, he states, have been
invaluable.
39

The lived experience of the South Central Farmers and their families can inform
our understanding of the way in which a piece of land empowers people to care for
themselves and their bodies, while the commentary of Pichardo and Crawford strongly
suggest that whole neighborhoods benefit from that investment. The South Central Farm
is a transformational garden that demonstrates how growing traditional foods within a
supportive community can become a tool for personal, social and political change. The
Farm brought people together and their shared struggle expressed the importance of
preserving an autonomous space for food production, and a chosen way of life for people
whose families had been farmers, too.

39
Many studies have proven a correlation between green spaces and a reduction of violent crime.
See, for instance, Kathleen Wolf, “Crime and Fear – A Literature Review,” University of
Washington Green Cities: Good Health web resource, Jun. 28, 2010,
http://depts.washington.edu/hhwb/Thm_Crime.html.

26

We can consider the Farmers’ work to preserve the Farm parallels other peasant
movements, for example, the ongoing highly visible armed struggle of the indigenous
people of Chiapas, Mexico. Without the choice to take up arms, the South Central
Farmers demonstrated solidarity with global struggles for the preservation of land and
cultural autonomy, which are threatened by moneyed interests. Like the peasant revolt in
Chiapas, the Farmers acted to preserve a way of life that is integral to their identity. Food
is life, as is language, and each testifies to a unique cultural inheritance. The preservation
of both is vital to cultural survival. The South Central Farm alerts us to the capacity of
gardening to improve peoples’ lives, build community, and, inherently, strengthen a
neighborhood’s livability.

27

Chapter 2
Creative Predecessors and Contemporaries

If I were a dictator determined to control the national press, Organic
Gardening would be the first publication I’d squash, because it’s the most
subversive. I believe that organic gardeners are in the forefront of a serious
effort to save the world by changing man’s orientation to it, to move away
from the collective, centralized, superindustrial state, toward a simpler,
realer, one-to-one relationship with the earth itself.
40

Bonnie Ora Sherk’s project Crossroads Community (The Farm), 1974 – 1980,
may be viewed as an important art historical example of a transformational garden.
Taking root in San Francisco, California, and known simply as The Farm, this
“pioneering, collaborative, hands-on, urban agriculture, environmental education and
multi-arts community center” organically “incorporated a major freeway interchange and
inspired the transformation of close to 7 acres of disparate land fragments into a new city
farm and park.”
41
Through this durational project, Sherk wanted to reconnect the
fragments of land and the residents of the four communities (Mission, Bernal Heights,
Potrero Hill, Bayview) that were fractured by the 101 Freeway Interchange. She sought
to connect these neighborhoods to each other and with the diverse species of plants and
animals, overturning her perception of the inherent alienation present in the locale.

40
This quote is from the Whole Earth Catalog of 1969. Forty-two years later, the Museum of
Modern Art exhibited Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1974).

41
Bonnie Ora Sherk, “Two New Museum Shows Feature Early Life Frames Leading to Evolution
of A Living Library,” A Living Library blog, Oct. 30, 2011,
http://www.alivinglibrary.org/blog/art-landscape-architecture-systemic-design/art-museum-
shows-feature-early-life-frames-leading-living-library.

28

Sherk, co-founder Jack Wickert, and invested friends worked to renew and
animate this area of derelict land that weaved under and around the freeway.
42
Speaking
with Sherk, it seems evident she approached the project of creating installations in public
space, as she had her previous body of work as a performance artist, with enthusiasm and
a strong will. Sherk earned her BA in Art from Rutgers University, and her MA in
Environmental Sculpture from San Francisco State University. As an artist she had
explored the relationship between humans, animals, and nature in the urban landscape.
Notable earlier works included Public Lunch, where she sat in an empty cage in the zoo
eating a catered lunch, adjacent to lions eating raw meat, and a migrating series titled
Portable Parks.
43

Sherk’s investment in creating an inviting green space, building community,
beautifying the urban landscape, and living more closely with nature all intersected at the
site of The Farm, which was itself the convergence of three creeks - the Islais, Precita,
and Serpentine. The gardens of The Farm bordered and were centered amidst the 101
Freeway Interchange, and the presence of greenery and healthy activity greatly shifted
the visual landscape. Students from over 75 schools in the area visited The Farm during
their school day, after school, and on weekends, and helped cultivate the gardens.
Playfully, The Raw Egg Animal Theatre (TREAT) allowed children to enjoy an
experiential involvement in both nature and the arts, and interact with the farm animals –

42
Most accounts do not credit Wickert as co-founder. See Will Bradley, “Let It Grow,” Frieze
magazine website, accessed Dec. 20, 2011, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/let_it_grow/.

43
This project bears no relation to the Harrisons’ Portable Orchard.

29

chicken, bunnies, pig – who lived there. The Farm was also one of the first alternative art,
and exhibition, spaces in the country.
44

After six dynamic years of working on The Farm, Sherk began work to secure
The Farm’s future. Sherk shared discussions with San Francisco’s “mayors, supervisors,
city and state agency heads, community groups, and others about the potential to acquire
the property and invest in its future.”
45
The area where The Farm used to be now boasts a
park called Potrero del Sol (The Field of the Sun). In addition to rolling lawns, a
performance stage, a skate park, and picnic tables, there is a 3-acre community garden
with about 80 plots and artists' live-work studios – reminders of The Farm's legacy. The
park is not dedicated to Sherk, and is now managed by Parks and Recreation for the City.
Sherk’s ability to establish The Farm and help preserve some of its beauty and value
speaks to how the positive affects of a transformational garden ideally endure beyond an
artist’s presence, through intention and strengthening of community.
Sherk’s ambitious creative vision for The Farm separated her from her artistic
contemporaries, since obtaining derelict land and farming were then considered outside
the purview of the arts.
46
She forged ahead independently, however, and sought additional

44
Wikipedia “Alternative Exhibition Space” entry, accessed Dec. 20, 2011,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_exhibition_space.

45
Sherk, “Two New Museum Shows.”

46
Bonnie Ora Sherk, interview with the author, 2009.

30

training in landscape architecture from the University of California, San Francisco.
47
In
her words, in 1977:
As an artist, I have tried to expand the concept of art to include, and even be, life,
and to make visible connections among different aesthetics and systems of
knowledge. The most recent and devotional vehicle for this coming together is a
multicultural, agricultural collaborative art work called Crossroads Community,
or more simple, The Farm...
48

The fortitude she evidenced in the face of rejection from her chosen profession is notable,
and her perseverance was, in time, recognized. Sherk’s early contribution to the field that
has substantially emerged at the intersection of art and the environment, both a spatial
and socially engaged practice, eventually received due praise and became understood as
exemplary. What she saw as a ‘life-scale environmental sculpture’ or a ‘life-frame,’ The
Farm evidenced a different way of thinking about creative practice that was
pedagogically playful, and merged with direct action.
Sherk demonstrated that cultural work could take place outside the parameters of
the cultural institution and a limited definition of art. Her work confirmed, vitally, that
nature and culture are interdependent, that cultural workers could get dirty with soil and
not paint, or some such familiar medium. Sherk’s enacting and supporting of social and
ecological processes, as creative acts, has subsequently inspired and nurtured ongoing
creative acts. In recent years documentation of The Farm has become widely exhibited as

47
A professional biography of Sherk is available on the Green Museum website, accessed Dec.
20, 2011, http://greenmuseum.org/content/artist_content/ct_id-182__artist_id-85.html.

48
Bonnie Ora Sherk, “Position Paper: Crossroads Community (The Farm),” in Art and Social
Change: A Critical Reader, eds. Will Bradley and Charles Esche (London: Tate, 2008), 18.
Sherk first presented this essay as a talk at the Symposium of the Center for Critical Enquiry, San
Francisco Art Institute, November 1977.

31

an important example of radical social and environmentally engaged art, as well as cited
in critical texts to help frame an emerging discourse, of activist-centered art.
49
As a result
of such early artworks as The Farm, new critical frameworks exist to better understand
how a transformational garden could claim, or perceive to be, an artwork.
A discourse about food and gardening in contemporary art has advanced
significantly in the thirty-two years since The Farm, when Sherk’s practice entered the
interdisciplinary territory of urban planning and environmental design. Today, the
concern about mitigating environmental catastrophe, which guarantees upheaval and
possibly migration, has thrust climate change, the potential threat of genetically modified
foods, and the West’s dependence on oil, over which war has been continuously fought,
into global prominence. These topics are increasingly placing food security, and
production methods, at center stage in world conversation, including for the arts.
One successor to The Farm is San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers,
which is established and led by artist Amy Franchesini. In 2007, Franchesini initiated
Victory Gardens, a two-year pilot project to encourage more sustainable food production
in collaboration with the City of San Francisco.
50
The title of the work was both a
commentary upon and a commendation of government-sponsored encouragement of
gardening in the United States during World War II, an effort to help protect the nation’s

49
Sherk and The Farm are lauded in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, eds. Will Bradley
and Charles Esche (London: Tate, 2008).

50
“What is Victory Gardens,” Future Farmers website, accessed Dec. 21, 2011,
http://www.futurefarmers.com/victorygardens/what.html.

32

strength and encourage food security, and, at the time, seen as a way to express
patriotism.
51

In the summer of 2008, Franchesini planted an edible organic garden at City Hall
with the city of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment and Mayor Newsom’s
support. Local residents volunteered to have various sized edible gardens planted in their
homes. Both the public and private gardens demonstrated that decentralized food
production and urban agriculture is viable and pleasurable. The project caused people to
take a more active role in food production and discuss US food policy, and encouraged
other cultural producers to approach similar issues.
Another notable example of a work at the intersection of art and gardening that
can claim Sherk as a forebear is Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates (2005 – 2010). Initially
trained and practicing as an architect, Haeg turned his attention to the front lawn as a site
for exploration and developed a durational project that expressed a strong desire for a
more sustainable way to produce food. As he shared: “I am not interested in invisibly
manicured precious landscapes that we are meant to passively watch like TV. I want
urban landscapes that are gardens, that show daily evidence of individual human desire
and ideas.”
52
Haeg has worked with private homeowners and with social housing,

51
In stark historical contrast to this moment, a number of US citizens have recenlty faced
criminal charges for keeping gardens. See, for instance, Reshma Kirpalani, “Woman Faces Jail
Time For Growing Vegetable Garden in Her Own Front Lawn,” ABC News Online, Jul. 12, 2011,
http://abcnews.go.com/US/vegetable-garden-brings-criminal-charges-oak-park-
michigan/story?id=14047214#.T2JCWRw0i6Y.

52
Fritz Haeg, ''My Gardening Story,'' talk delivered at the Garden Manifesto event, Serpentine
Gallery, London, Oct. 2011.

33

internationally, to unapologetically replace grass with lush edible landscapes. All of the
Edible Estates gardens have involved participation and collaboration from volunteers to
install and maintain. These participants inherit and maintain the garden in their
community, making the work’s longevity hinge on relational ties with people who share
Haeg’s passion.
The need to reprioritize food production, rethink consumption patterns, and turn
our focus to a more equitable distribution of resources are important concepts being
raised by Sherk, Franchesini, and Haeg. For millions of others, the already startling
effects of climate related natural disasters, poor harvests, shrinking pastures, and high
food prices are crises that have led to sweeping migration.
53
In the United States and
Europe, the contemporary context of economic uncertainty and potential upheaval has
given rise to increased xenophobia, in addition to the more recognized, related challenges
of the economic recession: joblessness, hunger, home foreclosures, and homelessness.
The context of upheaval and uncertainty has also led to migration from places that are
already feeling its brunt.
54

NAFTA allowed big US grain and meat producers, for instance, to export to
Mexico and sell at a very low price, subsidized by US taxpayers. Mexican
producers couldn't sell corn or meat for a price high enough to pay the costs of

53
“Surge of Climate Change-Caused Mass Migrations to Hit Asia-Pacific,” Common Dreams
website, Mar. 13, 2012, http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/13-5.

54
In the states of Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia, for example, huge numbers of Latinos have
fled in fear of new state policies. See Nicholas Riccardi, “Fleeing Phoenix out of Fear of
Immigration Law,” Los Angeles Times Online, Jul. 22, 2010,
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/22/nation/la-na-immigration-phoenix-20100723; and Mark
Guarino, “Anti-illegal Immigration Bill Stokes Backlash in Alabama Fields,” the Christian
Science Monitor Online, Oct. 22, 2011, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/1022/Anti-
illegal-immigration-bill-stokes-backlash-in-Alabama-fields.

34

growing it. Families then had to leave home, which meant selling their land
(allowed once Mexico changed its land-reform laws) and migrating in search of
work. Six million people came to the United States during that period,
overwhelmingly because survival had become so difficult because of these
changes.
55

Xenophobia has understandably spurred artists to address, or continue to address,
marginalization resulting from immigrant status, race, or socio-economic position. These
works express how all are not granted equal status, not just socio-economically, yet,
obviously, in cultural privilege and human rights. One such reminder, a difficult
confrontation with the outright disposability of bodies in domestic policies was taken up
in Wafaa Bilal’s controversial artwork Domestic Tension (2007), which placed him – an
Iraqi born artist – on the receiving end of a paintball gun that was accessible online, 24
hours a day, to an international audience. What happens when discourses around
gardening and cultural oppression merge?
The 2010 Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, provided an
opportunity to explore the question of gardening as art and the imbrication of all forms of
oppression.
56
This Summit exampled the increasing prominence of environmental art
works, and explored the ecology of living systems in tandem, and the disposability of
bodies within a global context. At the 2010 Summit, two speakers separately held the

55
“Truthout Contributor David Bacon on His New Book, ‘Illegal People,” by Mark Karlin,
Truthout.org, Feb. 9, 2012, http://www.truth-out.org/truthout-contributor-david-bacon-his-new-
book-illegal-people/1328731210#.T1zN6eqd8SA.facebook.

56
Based in New York, Creative Time is one of the largest public art commissioning agencies in
the United States, working nationally and, in the last few years, globally. Creative Time
consistently supports projects that address controversial politics, and recognizes exceptional
cultural producers.

35

stage and discussed the importance of cultivating local food systems that challenge the
way art is circulated and codified in its value.
I was particularly interested in artist Danielle Abrams’s talk, “Urban Decay and
Despair,” which engaged questions relating to institutional accountability, and access in
education, food and neighborhood resources. A graduate art class she taught at the
University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, encouraged students to engage with communities
and projects in Detroit. With funding provided by the University, a racially and
economically diverse group of people shared conversations and learned from each other’s
experiences. A pedagogical choice, and significant for transformational gardens as well,
these informal dialogues merged with the discursive formality of her seminar class.
The dire economic situation in 2008 created a mass exodus out of Detroit.
57

Viewing abandoned homes and lots helped to directly facilitate her students’
“reimagining community activism through the use of vacant land.” After he saw so much
socio-economic disparity firsthand, student Charlie Michaels decided to do something
about the problem of food deserts and began working with Earthworks Urban Farm in
their garden and soup kitchen. A reciprocal engagement developed, where everyone
benefitted. However, while Charlie found his time at Earthworks Urban Farm incredibly
rewarding, he did not consider the work to be his art practice. During her talk Abrams
posed the question: “how could we pivot our institutional framing of art so Charlie’s

57
Alex Kellogg, “Detroit Sinks Itself, Historic Homes and All,” Wall Street Journal Online, May
14, 2010,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703950804575242433435338728.html. In 2010,
this article stated that Detroit had “roughly 90,000 abandoned or vacant homes and residential
lots, according to Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit that tracks demographic data for the city.”

36

experience at Earthworks could be his practice?”
58
Without knowing Charlie, this is not
to presume he actually wants it to be his practice, rather, if he could more readily
construe gardening, feeding people, and beautifying a neighborhood as art, then would
that influence his understanding of it as his practice?
We can see the examples offered by The Farm, Victory Gardens, and Edible
Estates demonstrate that art projects that work for social justice instrumentalize
gardening and actually share similar characteristics with community gardens. In varying
ways, they intervene with the banality of structural inequity and poverty. The artists
initiating gardening projects, some curators and critics, and the cultural institutions
funding them, as well as a select viewing public, do now readily perceive such projects as
functioning in the context of the arts. There’s been a fair amount of exposure and
approbation for such practices. However, the works’ ability to benefit publics, address
social grievances, and, thereby, share connections with social movements, is of foremost
importance to the projects’ visibility.
Also at the Summit, artist and writer Claire Pentecost explained that in 1998, it
struck her “as a revelation that agriculture was part of nature.” Her referent had been
wilderness – an implicitly political construction that negates the presence of inhabitants
before European occupation – until she began learning about biotechnology and the
industrial food system. She discovered that the entrenched structural conditions of our
industrial food system inherently degrade life, and are exploited for profit. The failure to

58
Danielle Abrams, “Art and Urban Decay,” lecture presented at the Creative Time Summit:
Revolutions in Public Practice, New York, NY, Nov. 12-13, 2010. Video documentation of
Abrams’s lecture is archived on the Creative Time website, accessed Feb. 4, 2012,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/2010/10/10/test-post/.

37

protect the health of workers and consumers, and the incumbent environmental threats
are ours, collectively, to mitigate.
There are artists working in public practice and with human ecologies, actively
producing alternate patterns of food production, education, and leisure that generate and
sustain new ways of interrelating. Yet similar efforts are not limited to a small resistant
subculture because, Pentecost levies, ecological and political solutions are, ultimately,
cultural.
59
Solutions are not relegated to a bourgeois social movement, as the real question
is “how inclusively we pursue our visions?” Pentecost challenged us: “How do we
connect…an elective desire for change to the work of those who are fighting for their
lives?”
Within a capitalist liberal democracy that has commodified and mainstreamed
production standards with organically grown foods, it’s an illusion that integrating a less
toxic production standard is enough to change the face of agriculture. The radicality of
such proposals has been co-opted, and these reforms do not alter the fundamental
relations of power. Solutions must extend beyond the act of being a “green” consumer
because: “the corporations that intend to dictate our life choices can absorb a landslide of

59
There are countless examples of farm workers being poisoned from pesticide exposure,
resulting in deadly cancers, heatstroke, or death when workers are not treated fairly – for
example, when workers are not given breaks, or provided adequate water on-site. These are
ethical and human rights issues, and as consumers we become complicit, and inadvertently
support these labor conditions, when we purchase food produced under them, without holding
those responsible accountable.

38

middle-class social movements to the degree that they translate to new marketing niches
for those with disposable income.”
60
And the problems created are significant.
For example, interest in organic foods has made the cost of the indigenous grain
quinoa skyrocket so, now, most Bolivians can no longer afford its market price.
61
Similar
manifestations of this situation are occurring the world over, and illustrate that the
workers who feed the world often cannot afford the food they grow, package, and
distribute. Problematically, such food policy might seem to serve wealthier consumers,
but because it is unsustainable and unethical, ultimately, it does not.
Pentecost encouraged the audience to reimagine what “the good life” means to us
today, and proposed that an acknowledgement of shared resources is binding. Alterations
to the system of food production and consumption, and what we have normalized as food
or nourishment, have the power to drastically alter the positional relations of people, and
will also help to alter the profound alienation between humans and the natural world. In
Pentecost’s words:
And so we push, we push our efforts to work in solidarity with those beyond our
realm of privilege. Beyond the cycles of marketing are millions whom the market
ignores. The real strength of the movement for food security and sustainability is
the degree to which those people are creating their own systems of production and
exchange.

60
Claire Pentecost, lecture presented at the Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public
Practice, New York, NY, November 12-13, 2010. Video documentation of Pentecost’s lecture is
archived on the Creative Time website, accessed Feb. 20, 2012,
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/summit/WP/2010/10/10/claire-pentecost/.

61
Joshua Keating, “Conflict Quinoa,” Foreign Policy Passport blog, Mar. 5, 2012,
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/03/05/conflict_quinoa.

39

Regarding production and exchange, independent American farmers have been
sued when GMOs have taken root in their fields, blown there by the wind.
62
There has
been a plague of suicides in India by farmers anguished over unsuccessful GMO crops,
often drinking the chemicals they’d purchased to help what proved infertile seeds to
grow.
63
Evidence suggests that GMOs have caused cancer in tests performed on lab rats.
The ecosystem of the planet and people are intertwined, so the potential environmental
and human problems relating to GMOs are inseparable.
Gilles Clement’s idea of the “Third Landscape,” a fragment of the Planetary
Garden, pronounces that areas left unattended contain more genetic diversity than those
utilized or restrained by human hand – or by machine. In contrast, Clement shares his
concern about GMOs:
…with these manipulations the big laboratories take half, or perhaps all, of the
human population hostage, forcing the consumption of modified products,
stimulating their sale and prohibiting other products. The result is that they keep
growing these modified plants that kill or sterilize, and in perspective they could
reach the point of destroying the life of the planet.
64

The topic is clearly contentious and has surfaced in the arts with considerable scrutiny.
In 2004 artist Steve Kurtz was arrested for exploring the politics of biotechnology
in a work called Free Range Grains, which was undertaken as a collaborative project

62
See Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear,” Vanity Fair Online,
May 2008, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805; and Stephanie
M. Bernhardt, “High Plains Drifting: Wind-Blown Seeds and The Intellectual Property
Implications of the GMO Revolution,” Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual
Property 4.1 (Fall 2005), http://www.law.northwestern.edu/journals/njtip/v4/n1/1/.

63
The excellent documentary I Want My Father Back by Suma Josson attests to this travesty.

64
Alessandro Rocca, ed., Planetary Gardens: The Landscape Architecture of Gilles Clément
(Basel: Birkhauser, 2008), 75.

40

with the group Critical Art Ensemble – one member being Claire Pentecost. The unusual
case received much attention within a specific art world context, and resulted in a
massive mobilization to help pay for Kurtz’s lawyer fees. This push to support a fellow
cultural worker demonstrated the strength in solidarity and resulted in Kurtz’s subsequent
release. The case also proved that symbolic artworks, and the arts themselves, are,
indeed, enmeshed in messy world affairs.
The pristine white cube gallery and clean museum walls are not a world apart, or
immune from politics. Rather, the political significance of artworks cannot be detracted
from by the austerity and presumable blankness of white walls. Artists who are willing to
take up controversial topics can help redirect attention to how high the stakes are in
challenging the status quo. Curators, critics, galleries and cultural institutions can support
and champion an artist’s work if they choose, and the power of boards to invest in
politically important works can set an inspiring example.
We can observe an encouraging development of socially and environmentally
focused projects that instrumentalize gardening as a medium in relation to the
increasingly fraught local and global context. While the threats of climate change and the
ravages of capitalism are forcing migration and food insecurity, and the world recession
has resulted in a staggering increase in hunger, the sanctuary of a garden can support
local food production. Local food production diminishes reliance on oil and challenges
harmful policies that search for new lands to grow GMOs on abroad. Instrumentalizing
gardening has created endless beneficial ripples, while helping to force these challenging
issues to center stage in the arts.

41

Chapter 3
La Semeuse

La Semeuse is a durational art project intended to support increased socialization
and strengthen coexistence in the ethnically diverse and rapidly gentrifying working class
neighborhood of Aubervilliers, outside Paris. La Semeuse is a public garden, as well as a
seed and plant bank, that offers creative arts programming and a gathering space that
nurtures the local community, which represents more than 130 different immigrant
nationalities and cultures.
65
La Semeuse was initiated by Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc
and commissioned by the non-profit art space, Les Laboratoires D’Aubervilliers. The
garden is seen as a “relational object” through which to form new social relations
amongst local residents.
66
This growth of social bonds exists alongside the physical
changes in the garden, an interwoven, interdependent growth.
Working with Potrc was a curatorial priority for Les Laboratoires because of her
ability to respond sensitively to site and local needs through customized projects. Potrc
has spent extensive time in India since the 70s, learning from and collaborating with the
pioneering Barefoot College, a rural college that curates knowledge that is not associated
with credentialed degrees.
67
Potrc is a longstanding believer in working in harmony with

65
Grégory Castéra, Alice Chauchat, and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, “Artistic Project 2010–2012,”
Le Journal des Laboratoires, accesed Jan. 18, 2012,
http://www.leslaboratoires.org/en/informations/artistic-project.

66
Potrc’s own term, “relational object” builds off of art luminary Joseph Beuys’s idea of “social
sculpture.” The catalyzation of social relations around the growth of a garden, seed, and plant
bank, for example, also creates new relational ties and conditions. As such, Potrc’s work on La
Semeuse illustrates a form of “redirective practice,” another of her own terms that allows for
better understanding of Potrc’s intentions. This thesis is intent on making personal experience and
analysis trump preapproved theoretical knowledge; hence, I will deflect attention to my own
voice and descriptions, rather than quotations, however useful Potrc’s are.

42

nature, and though trained as an architect she practices as an artist. Globally, she has
sought to integrate her experience and critical insight about social inequity and
sustainability with environmental infrastructure – gardens, water catchment systems,
composting toilets, grey water systems – to support and empower communities.
I’ll briefly mention a few of Potrc’s projects, to give a better sense of her work.
The first is called Dry Toilet (2003), and was the result of a six-month stay in Caracas,
Venezuela. During this time Potrc and her collaborator, Liyat Esakov, researched the
informal city with the support of a local organization, the Caracas Case Project. With
building materials and sanitation infrastructure:
A dry, ecologically safe toilet was built on the upper part of La Vega barrio, a
district in the city without access to the municipal water grid. The project attempts
to rethink the relationship between infrastructure and architecture in real-life
urban practice in a city where about half the population receives water from
municipal authorities no more than two days a week.
68

Another project A school in Sharjah: Solar-Powered Desalination Device (2007), in
the United Arab Emirates, was part of the Sharjah Biennial 8. It provided energy and
water-supply infrastructure:
A small desalination device powered by solar energy was installed in a public
school in Al Dhaid. It provides fresh drinking water for the students. Although the
main desalination plant in Sharjah City is intended to supply drinking water to all
residents, in some parts of the city only salty water comes out of the drinking taps.
The desalination plant runs on fossil fuels, reflecting the area's dependence on oil.
In Sharjah, solar energy is only rarely used to create electricity.
69

67
See the Barefoot College website, http://www.barefootcollege.org; as well as Bunker Roy,
“Learning from a Barefoor Movement,” presented for the TED talk lecture series, Oct. 17, 2011,
and archived on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qqqVwM6bMM.

68
Marjetica Potrc, “On-site Projects,” Potrc’s website, accessed Feb. 10, 2012,
http://potrc.org/project2.htm.

43

As is customary for Potrc, early site visits introduced her to the specificity of
Aubervilliers and allowed her to build social networks based on empathy and trust before
any visible project took root or became publicized. With the help of introductions from
Les Laboratoires, each of Potrc’s visits included time spent in community gardens and
building her relationship with local organizations that support related social services. The
neighborhood surrounding the art space is fragmented by language and geographic
breadth, yet the affirming number of community gardens helps to bring people together.
Potrc imbedded herself in the social fabric of Aubervilliers, she ate, drank, and
visited with residents. She did her best to communicate, and connect, in French, and won
the warmth of many new allies. She saw characteristics in existing community gardens
that she adopted as the ethical foundation for her project. A shared narrative between
members of the gardens and accountability to a space to nurture community was already
present. Long walks were captured on camera, and sent to collaborators as data.
70

Les Laboratoires D’Aubervilliers was initiated in 1993 in a former light
metallurgy factory as a space for artistic creation. One year later, then-Mayor of
Aubervilliers, Jack Ralite, invited artists to work in the space and so it became a place for
artistic creation and trans-disciplinary exchange. Les Laboratoires seeks to create the
structural conditions to support “projects that do not fit pre-existing systems of artistic
and cultural production.”
71
Projects are publicized in the Journal des Laboratoires, and

69
Potrc, “On-site Projects.”

70
Potrc makes colored ink drawings explicating concepts related to her projects, which the
galleries that represent her sell. These sales help support her ability to work on projects like La
Semeuse and sustain the breadth of her creative practice.

44

“take different forms: performances, projections, lectures, concerts, meals, etc.” The art
space has a keen interest in “the development of alternative approaches to knowledge and
practice sharing on a local level, which lead to an ongoing criticism and renewal of what
is at stake in artistic research.”
72

Les Laboratories is adjacent to a boxing gym, which is a lively spot for
socializing and sport. This gym offers local residents more than fitness, it has helped
women and men win championships.
73
A large metal gate is open during the day, people
move in and out of the gym and the art space, which at night is locked. By the gate’s
entrance, in a small cottage, lives the property’s caretaker with his wife. There is sloping
concrete front yard area, the esplanade, which becomes level and connects to a wide
grassy area, and leads to bushes and trees, and a short flight of stairs descend to a
concrete patio below.
The wide glass doors of Les Laboratoires are often open during the day, and
reveal a front entrance that also poses as a lounge, meeting space, and exhibition hall.
That area is overlooked by office space for the team, with skylights opening up the high
ceilinged space even further. There is also a kitchen, bathroom, auditorium, room for film
screenings, artists’ studio space, and two rooms for resident artists, a small private

71
Castéra, Chauchat, and Petrešin-Bachelez, “Artistic Project 2010-2012.”

72
Castéra, Chauchat, and Petrešin-Bachelez, “Artistic Project 2010-2012.”

73
Socio-historically, boxing has been understood as a means of escape from dire poverty, an
association documented in such novels as Leonard Gardner’s Fat City (New York: Farrar, Straus,
& Giroux, 1969).

45

bathroom, and a workshop. These are all concealed behind a huge sliding wood door for
security at night.
Before one enters the building, an arrangement of 60 big red, soil-filled bags
constructed from durable material extend over the esplanade. They did not all get added
immediately, there was a humble line of bags in front of the bushes and trees, holding
space, for months, until the process of installing all 60 began. The bags were chosen with
the help of the local architectural firm RozO Architects, initial contributors to the design
of the project, and rest atop wooden pallets. They will grow a variety of crops and
flowers; their opulent color welcomes people to the site now, and the bags serve as
planters.
The desire to separate the natural from the cultural has been sustained for
hundreds of years.
74
Within the local community gardens in Aubervilliers there exists a
counter narrative, where that false logic of separation was ousted. How was that
achieved? Aubervilliers is home to many survivors of harsh political regimes, who
arrived in France in search of a better life. In their home countries, whether having left
rural farming communities, struggling with drought, escalating food prices, or food
shortages, people’s interdependence with nature is a lived experience. And it is also a
healing balm. The inextricable bonds all life shares, and its fragility, was knowledge
shared and felt in the gardens. Enjoying the garden, tending one’s plot, an afternoon or
evening of performing arts, restful or festive group meals, relaxed interludes for

74
See Henrik Hakansson, “A Tale from a Forest Without a Name (Pitta gurneyi),” in LAND,
ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, ed. Max Andrews (London: The RSA, 2006), 111.

46

communing contributed to applying care to the wounds and memories, and hard daily
facts of life.
This understanding helped shape Potrc’s impetus with La Semeuse, and,
importantly, lead to her meeting teachers from the local community who became part of
the project’s vision. As art critic Claire Doherty’s explains: “artists can also work from a
position of solidarity…the effectiveness of this solidarity depends on their sensitivity to
local political dynamics, histories and cultures and the possibility of a sustained
relationship with participants.”
75

Motivated by the profits to be made from development, the allure of gardens also
supports the attempt by the municipality to clean up Aubervilliers’ image. Artists had
already been drawn to Aubervilliers by the affordable rent and rich cultural diversity, and
people would visit for cultural destinations, including at Les Laboratoires. However, the
employees of the art space understood that they weren’t reaching, or known to, many
local residents, regardless of their unorthodox programming. La Semeuse focuses on the
local community’s needs, prioritizing and nurturing connections with residents over the
attention and praise of the art world in Paris, which the curators were glad for too.
The name La Semeuse draws meaning both from Aubervilliers’ past and the
prospect of sowing seeds, both literal and metaphoric, in the present and for the future. La
Semeuse, the “Sower” or “She who Sows” was a symbol of the French Revolution. The
nation circulated her image on stamps used in the first half of the twentieth century, on
the franc, and on the Larousse dictionary. Mobility, wealth, and knowledge were all

75
Claire Doherty, “Curating Wrong Places . . . Or Where Have All the Penguins Gone?,” in
Curating Subjects, ed. Paul O’Neill (London: De Appel, 2007), 106.

47

associated with her, the latter, importantly, creating a connection between the abundance
of nature and culture. She symbolized the beauty and fecundity of the Republic. By the
late 1960’s, many of France’s colonies, which served as land for crop cultivation, had
gained their independence. The appropriation of La Semeuse by the art space signifies an
attempt to redefine fecundity, how it is achieved, by and for whom, and what it
constitutes.
In the 18
th
and 19
th
century, Aubervilliers consisted of rich agricultural lands that
grew excellent food for all of Paris. Known as Plaine des Vertus (the plains of virtue),
there were small villages and large fields that required intensive labor to prosper. People
who had previously lived in rural areas were encouraged to migrate to this outskirt of
Paris, as well as new residents arriving from French colonies. Alongside this food
production, Aubervilliers underwent dramatic changes in 1830 and became a site for
heavy industry that, over time, required limitations be put in place to protect the area, and
people, from pollution. Agricultural production came to a halt after World War II, and
factories were shut down in the 70s and 80s. As a result, unemployment rose
dramatically, and the population fell through the 90s.
76

Economic investments issued by the national government have, today, helped
employment return to the level it was at before the economic depression.
77
According to
the last census in 2008, the population has increased to roughly 74,000 people, which

76
Carlos Semedo, interview with the author, Mar. 18, 2012. Semedo is director of associations
and international relations at the mayor’s office in the town of Aubervilliers.

77
Semedo described how for over a decade economic investment and relocation of industry to
Aubervilliers has been dramatic. One investment included the Stade de France, where the ’98
World Cup was held.

48

does not include illegal immigrants. Semedo explained that every year, since 2008, a new
school has been built to accommodate the swell of growth in the population.
Aubervilliers remains the most diverse area in all of France; one third of the current
population is foreign born, with the largest percentage being Algerian, then Chinese.
78

The historical memory of Aubervilliers’s agricultural past has been largely obfuscated or
erased. Recent economic investments have generated more jobs, and the population has
risen by 1000-1500 people a year.
79

While considered less dangerous than neighboring suburbs, riots were sparked in
Aubervilliers beginning October 25
th
, 2005 after the death of two male youths of North
African descent. “Witnesses state that the two boys were being chased by police,
however, authorities deny that they were being chased by police at the time.”
80
Across the
country, thousands of cars were set on fire and hundreds of arrests were made. Curfews
were imposed to quell the urban unrest, which continued to escalate and spread to other
cities. The government chose to implement emergency measures to try to restore order.
“On November 14th, then President Jacques Chirac pledged to create employment and

78
Semedo, interview.

79
The lauded French film by Laurent Cantet, The Class (2008), explores the daily challenges of
one schoolteacher amidst his pupils, the children of recent immigrants. The film is based on the
personal account of a teacher from a school district neighboring Aubervilliers, and affords
copious insight about the responsibility he and his colleagues inherit (and mismanage), the power
struggles therein, and how school policy may act as an extension of the state’s official
assimilation courses for immigrants.

80
Tajuddin, “Islam in Paris.”

49

other opportunities for young people in an effort to prevent resurgence of urban
violence.”
81

Amidst these uncertainties and challenges, many gardens are thriving in
Aubervilliers, each with distinct characteristics. Jardins ouvriers translate to allotments,
or workers gardens, and jardins partagés are shared gardens, which are much smaller and
newer in tradition. In Aubervilliers, amidst “a dense urban landscape, the Société des
Jardins Ouvriers des Vertus is an organization that manages 85 garden plots on just over
2.5 hectares.”
82
A place for gardening collectively, the site remains a testimony to the
history of working people in France. Since the Industrial Revolution in France, and then
thanks to social policies that supported the importance of creating allotments for social
and alimentary health.
The membership of the Société des Jardins Ouvriers des Vertus’s is entirely
French Caucasian. The neighborhood has undergone such drastic changes over the years,
what could be described as “white flight,” and many gardeners travel to Aubervilliers to
tend their plot since moving. The waiting list for plots is very long, if any are released.
Contrastingly, the many jardins partages in Aubervilliers are utilized by a far more
diverse section of the neighborhood’s current inhabitants.
In Aubervilliers, a large percentage of people are currently living in social
housing. The ability to rely on one’s own garden for healthy food is important regardless
of the many other benefits gained within. The dramatic changes in the neighborhood

81
Tajuddin, “Islam in Paris.”

82
Clément, Potrc, and Guilain, “Conversation.”

50

include additional subways stops adjacent to newly constructed apartments. These are
accompanied by looming cuts to social housing, which in the next twenty years will
displace many low-income residents and further push them to the periphery.
83
To many in
Paris, Aubervilliers already is the periphery. Known as the “banlieue” – literally, Paris
city outskirts, or, rather deceptively, the suburbs – a unique way of speaking French has
evolved within its borders. Such idiomatic expressions of ownership for the
disenfranchised are wholly comparable to what has emerged in a lexicon within the inner
city in the United States.
In a city renowned for its symbolic power, Aubervilliers is certainly not a tourist
destination. Nor is it an alluring destination for Parisians. While Aubervilliers is
commonly viewed as a suburb, it is an enclave that is foreign to most Parisians. It is
outside of the twenty arrondissements, or administrative districts, to the northeast of
Paris. Previously known as the Red Belt, due to the population’s communist sympathies
and strong unions, it is now a site for development and economic ambitions. Illegal
immigrants are routinely arrested on the street, arrests that evidence the neighborhood is
changing its presentation and reputation, to attract and accommodate more affluent future
inhabitants.
84

83
During my stay in Aubervilliers, Marjetica Potrc reported that the municipality plans to
diminish social housing in the future. In asking for clarification for this text, she explained her
understanding, which was the municipality had made a contract with developers that incorporate
social housing and, as a result, social housing will be cut from forty percent to twenty percent.
When I spoke with Carlos Semedo about this, he said that Potrc’s information was incorrect, and
I am eager to have this clarified. Regardless, the project was informed by Potrc’s original
understanding.

84
See Doug Ireland, “What Sarkozy’s Victory Means,” Direland blog, Mar 6, 2007,
http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2007/05/french_election.html; and “Challenging the

51

In response to the anticipated influx of new residents, La Semeuse seeks to create
an enduring space for the population of Aubervilliers to feel welcome and engaged with
their community, to be empowered regardless of the changes in their neighborhood and,
moreover, actively involved in shaping its – and their own – future. La Semeuse hopes to
preserve and sustain the history of Aubervilliers and its residents, who confront the social
stigmatization faced by immigrants and low-income residents, and the increasing
pressure of unavoidable impinging development.
The gentrification process exposes social inequities in the neighborhood, and
many current residents in social housing stand to lose their homes. This situation in
Aubervilliers reflects a state of global crisis, summarily “the total exhaustion of viable
systematic alternatives to Western liberalism” in Francis Fukuyama’s words, or “the end
of history, as such.”
85
At the same time, it also offers an important opportunity to learn
from a diverse cultural landscape, and explore alternative systems of meaning and value.

dominance of capital in theory and practice,” News and Letters (Aug-Sep 2007), accessed Feb.
10, 2012, http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2007/Aug-Sept/Draftperp-Aug-Sept_07.htm.
Citing the former article, the latter states: “That adequate social services and a rising standard of
living for workers is no longer compatible with the accumulation of capital on an ever expanding
scale is dramatically shown by Nicolas Sarkozy's election as France's president. He has
proclaimed the goal of making a ‘clean break with the past’ by ending Gaullist policies that
favored a strong state role in the economy. He advocates weak trade unions, tax breaks for big
business, and cuts in the national health system. He has viciously attacked immigrants and
citizens of non-European descent, calling for hiring more police, building more prisons, and
taking punitive measures against the restless, unemployed Black and Middle Eastern youth. Just
prior to the election he stated that the legacy of the French student-worker revolt of 1968 must be
‘liquidated.’ Although Sarkozy is likely to face much opposition from the French masses to these
moves, ‘what Sarkozy's victory means for France is something closer to the so-called 'Reagan
Revolution' in the U.S. that began in 1981 the process of dismantling and destroying the
institutional New Deal legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt [sic].’”
85
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” Wes Jones’s Home Page, accessed Feb. 10, 2012,
http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm.

52

Every Wednesday afternoon at La Semeuse is a time for the public to see what is
growing in the big bags, participate in after-school workshops, and the “creation of a
network of non-profit organizations and people interested in urban gardening.”
86
And La
Semeuse Tuesday’s, every third week of the month, is a time for the team at Les
Laboratoires, with instructor Guilain Marcel Roussel and Valérie Lessertisseur to host
dialogue through “the exchange of seeds, plants and knowledge.” Screenings of films
about gardening, shared group discussions, and plant walks are also possibilities. This
format seeks to honor the individuals involved and affirm a rich collective inheritance.
People in the neighborhood are invited to take ownership of La Semeuse and
share their unique knowledge, including culinary traditions, through participatory
activities. While rooms inside the art space are available and utilized, the garden is the
medium through which the social is anchored. The garden is the connective base for
participants to gather around and promulgate a vision of human dignity and equity.
Engaging community programming around the garden is ongoing, and intended to
provide healthy forms of socializing and being esteemed, creating alternative structures
of support so children have less incentive to get in trouble or adults to feel alienated from
one another.
Part of Potrc’s role in Aubervilliers has been to help remember and preserve
history. Such preservation would not have been possible for La Semeuse without the
project’s dialogical roots, and the collaboration of invested cultural producers, many
living within the community, who facilitate La Semeuse with local residents. La Semeuse

86
Le Journal des Laboratoires website front page, accesed Feb. 10, 2012,
http://www.leslaboratoires.org/en.

53

asserts the importance of cultural memory through the presence of biodiversity, aided by
the seed and plant banks. The project plays off a very important aspect of France’s
history of investing in social welfare, by supplying gardening space to the working class
in challenging urban areas.
87
With La Semeuse, the memory of the jardin ouvriers is
intoned and resuscitated, and a new tradition that includes the jardins partagés is
embraced.
A resident of Aubervilliers, Roussel was a student of Gilles Clément and
graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure of Versailes, where his final studies
focused on the development of gardens in the plan of Aubervilliers. He is a landscape
architect, and one of his main foci is as an interlocutor for La Semeuse now. Lessertisseur
is an artist who has lived in Aubervilliers since 1995, and has taught art and ecology
classes there since 2008. Both Roussel and Lessertisseur were personally selected by
Potrc to continue and build upon her vision for La Semeuse, as she valued their ongoing
investment in working with the community and its social histories and plant ecology.
One of Roussel’s many contributions to the design and implementation of La
Semeuse is to leave a section of the garden area untended, which maintains the land as a
public amenity that effortlessly and organically nurtures diversity. This returns us to the
idea of the Third Landscape, one of Clément’s most important concepts, described in his
own words: “Compared to the territories submitted to the control and exploitation by
man, the Third Landscape forms a privileged area of receptivity to biological
diversity….the genetic reservoir of the planet, the space of the future.”

87
“Les Jardins Ouvriers,” Le Pieton de Paris blog, Jun. 8, 2009,
http://pietondeparis.canalblog.com/archives/2009/06/08/14004305.html.

54

The significance of this distinction between The Third Landscape and fallow land
is critical. Roussel’s choice to preserve such a territory within La Semeuse helps to
reframe the experience of the inhabitants of Aubervilliers, by viewing people born in
foreign lands as ‘belonging’ in France as equally as native-born citizens. Or, again, in
Clément’s words:
Viewing the Third Landscape as a biological necessity, conditioning the future of
living things, modifies the interpretation of territory and enhances areas usually
looked upon as negligible. It is up to the political body to organize ground
division in such a manner as to assume responsibility for these undetermined
areas, tantamount to concern for the future.
88

We can also re-examine, and complexify, what we see as indigenous. Clément believes:
“A discourse that divides things into categories, plants, humans, animals into indigenous
or exogenous is a dangerous discourse that aims to eradicate the foreign by preserving a
historically accepted whole that must not change.”
89

The project, in Potrc’s words, is “a monument, not in the traditional sense of the
word but as a symbolic object that a society needs in order to transform things. It’s not
enough to talk, we have to act, come together around an object that we can visualize, that
makes it possible to get things done.”
90
In contrast to the nation’s seeming antipathy to
immigrants, at least as expressed in numerous of President Sarkozy’s policies, including a
ban on wearing the burqa and the prohibition of gypsy encampments, La Semeuse
respects people’s autonomy and diverse values. As Potrc expressed:

88
Gilles Clément, “Le Tiers Paysage,” Clément’s website, accesed Nov. 16, 2012,
http://www.gillesclement.com/cat-tierspaysage-tit-le-Tiers-Paysage.

89
Gilles Clément, Potrc, and Roussel, “Conversation.”

90
Gilles Clément, Potrc, and Roussel, “Conversation.”

55

We are asking the question of how people can organize and influence the local
government. And if the government will consider La Semeuse as a pilot project.
Our project has come about at a very interesting time, and we want people to lay
claim to it so that they can share their vision for the town.
91

The current Mayor of Aubervilliers, Jacques Salvator, belongs to the Socialist
Party, which many in France see as advocating for a neoliberal agenda. He has been
associated with changing the face of Aubervilliers, and helping to usher in the
construction of new buildings that are underway. Salvator visited La Semeuse during its
opening ceremony in May of 2011, with another city official and Carlos Semedo.
Semedo is an important figure in Aubervilliers, whose professional title is Director of
Associations and International Relations at the Mayor’s Office/Town of Aubervilliers.
His office acts as a clearinghouse for all the social organizations that support the residents
of Aubervilliers. Those include services for immigrants, which provide culturally specific
aid and affinity to help create community. Semedo has been a great friend to La Semeuse,
introducing many people to the project and the project to many people.
As a transformational garden, La Semeuse exists in recognition of and allegiance
with the struggle for the right to self-determination. The project is sensitive to the ways in
which myriad cultural traditions are marginalized in the media and dominant culture.
Those involved know when immigrants “respond to the multiple identities imposed upon
them by others: when they are forced to see themselves as someone else’s invention”
92
it
diminishes the very dignity in diversity. With the seed and plant bank, biodiversity and

91
Gilles Clément, Potrc, and Roussel, “Conversation.”

92
Nūruddīn Faraḥ, quoted on Ryan Hilliard’s BAQĀ blog, Nov. 3, 2011,
http://ryanbhilliard.tumblr.com/post/12295814817/farah-colonialism.

56

food traditions provide a form of resiliency, preserving not just personal and cultural
memory and inheritance, but also that which capitalism cannot duplicate – the fecundity
of Planet Earth. Publicly supporting such fecundity empowers the real differences
between people, which, ideally, can be fluid sources of interest rather than division.
Within this morass of illogical ends, transformational gardens may “comprise a
model of ‘development without growth’, to improve the quality of life of the largest
number of people without increasing economic production and consumption.”
93
While
still in an early stage, La Semeuse is beginning to encourage a more decentralized,
horizontal administrative structure that creates networks to address infrastructural
collapse. With La Semeuse, community is forged outside of a commodified social
exchange and inclusion is dialogical, participatory. People matter and are valued,
education is free and inviting, and everyone’s knowledge is important.
Purporting to be neither a utopia nor a fix for real socio-political ills, La Semeuse
instead offers strategies that encourage a capacity for empathy and mutuality, and suggest
that interdependency with nature and each other is paramount. La Semeuse honors the
knowledge of those seen as dispossessed and integrates the wisdom of its participants,
many from rural communities, into the fundamental bricolage it is growing to become.
Commissioned by an esteemed institution of culture, the project ably refutes the
fallacious belief that nature and culture are separate. As arbiters of culture, the producers
themselves actually refute this notion.

93
T.J. Demos, “The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology,” in Radical Nature: Art and
Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969 – 2009 (London: Barbican Art Gallery and Koenig
Books, 2009), 26.

57

An organization like Les Laboratoires nurtures and sustains local, national and
international contacts. Online and printed material enables documentation of the project,
and its conceptual underpinnings, to travel broadly. The realities of social and cultural
capital provide an assurance La Semeuse will be viewed and discussed widely, in addition
to among the residents and participants from Aubervilliers. La Semeuse strengthens the
attention to gardening as a creative practice, therefore its ability to heal the false binary
between nature and culture, or agriculture and culture, is expressed quite differently than
in the South Central Farm.
The cultural and social capital of an esteemed artist and supportive cultural
institution are inscribed within privilege, and exert power, however sensitively and
beautifully yielded, shared and self-aware. Leveraging such privilege and redistributing it
is inherent to La Semeuse. A re-evaluation of the schism between nature and culture is
instigated, the illusory separation a product of hundreds of years of faulty reasoning.
Culture or, more specifically, culturally recognized forms of culture, have been viewed as
a bourgeois entitlement. Inherent within La Semeuse, the authority of the artist –
Caucasian – and the institution – also Caucasian – are perpetuated. The elite roles the
artist and cultural institution leverage to overcome this tyranny of thoughts also subtly
reifies, or re-inscribes these very social divides.
Within La Semeuse, the design and implementation of the garden, especially the
big red bags, functions with much symbolic importance. The seed and plant bank are of
great value, and so is bringing together people as previously described. In comparison,
the South Central Farm abundantly fed the people who worked the land and offered a

58

daily reprieve from the stresses of life, contributing pleasantly to the neighborhood’s
appearance and helping people feel safer outdoors.
In comparing La Semeuse to a community garden that functioned outside of the
realm of art, like the South Central Farm, we can see that each challenges an economic
system that oppresses and marginalizes people by encouraging: “a demystified and
decentralized system where the management, control and ownership of the technology lie
in the hands of the communities themselves and not dependent on paper-qualified
professionals from outside the villages.”
94

In contrast, what is commonly referred to as “the art world” – though there are
many art worlds – exists within that implicitly hierarchical economic system. Potrc’s
creative practice has awarded her status within this market hierarchy, evident in
prestigious gallery representation over two continents, receiving prominent international
awards, and by her repeated inclusion in the Venice Biennale. However she supports the
furtherance of decentralized systems of power, as reflected by ongoing projects focusing
on supporting cultural and environmental sustainability with local communities, which
she chronicles in her drawings and sells to support further embodied work on the ground.

94
John Vidal, “Civilization Faces ‘Perfect Storm of Ecological and Social Problems,’” The
Guardian UK Online, Feb. 20, 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/20/climate-change-overconsumption.

59

Conclusion
Thresh, Harvest, Compost

Transformational gardens exercise an explicit desire for a new social contract
based on mutual respect and the inherent dignity of all of life. The South Central Farm
affirms that gardens everywhere may generate the conditions for personal and collective
transformation. Does it really matter if The Farm and La Semeuse are recognized as art
within the communities they serve, does it serve these projects to be framed as art?
Regarding the former I’d argue no, and for the latter, however, when recognized as art,
the international artistic community, with its immense social and cultural capital can,
when moved, mobilize to change the world. Or artist, curators and cultural institutions
can interpret and build on an inspiring creative work, and proceed to explore it in new
iterations.
The disposability of bodies is enacted daily, moment-by-moment, tearing up our
bodies and our earth. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, “The perpetual
growth myth…promotes the impossible idea that indiscriminate economic growth is the
cure for all the world's problems, while it is actually the disease that is at the root cause of
our unsustainable global practices.” Encouragingly, however, “the problems of
corruption, wastage of funds, poor technology choices and absent transparency or
accountability are social problems for which they are innovative solutions are emerging
from the grassroots.”[sic]
95
Transformational gardens are a modest yet articulate means to
practice and formulate a challenge to the corrosive might of capitalism, or power that

95
Vidal, “Perfect Storm.”

60

serves money. They can demonstrate another power, which is the self-sustainable
organization of people.
Art institutions are increasingly channeling their resources into creating spaces,
onsite and offsite, that implement viable on-the-ground results of a community garden
like the South Central Farms. The narrative of sustainability with an emphasis on
interconnected processes around gardening can help to reinvigorate civil society, and is
an investment in both autonomy and community, which curators and art institutions seem
willing and happy to support. Transformational gardens can be understood as important
contributions to “an empowering urban development; an urban development that returns
the city and the city’s environment to its citizens,” curator Stephanie Smith of the Smart
Museum of Art in Chicago frames.
Today’s world situation promises an increased need for transformational gardens.
Understanding the deficits in government and local municipalities exposes an opening for
more and greater creativity in addressing neglected aspects of a commitment to our
shared well-being. Building an alternative cultural ecology must come from patient
efforts and maintaining a willingness to address the suffering and exclusion of others
from privileges we may take for granted – having the means to nourish one’s self, period,
let alone with fresh vegetables and fruits, feeling safe outdoors, or supported in one’s
own skin, race, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, etc.
Transformational gardens are encouraging examples of an alternative to the
endless growth of capitalism, as predicated on the exploitation and degradation of people
and natural resources. Each garden uniquely operates within a nexus for socio-cultural

61

healing, applied within material constraints that fundamentally support important
practicalities of urban living. Whether funded by a cultural institution or the local
government, these gardens may rightly be viewed as durational investments in the
creation of a more just, sustainable world. They inspire hope amidst crisis and upheaval,
and seek to connect all involved to place and each other.
The ability to situate these three transformational gardens within broader
liberatory struggles, including the recent Occupy movement, is relevant. The social
aspect of each project reflects a shift towards forging deeply rooted community outside of
commodified social exchange. At the intersection of art, urban planning, and agriculture,
they challenge this destructive fate, and instead intervene with hopeful possibilities to be
more widely emulated. Correctly, we may perceive that the legacy of colonialism
imbricates us all in lingering forms of violence. Framed as a garden, seen as an art
project, or both, a false dichotomy between nature and culture becomes collapsed in a
transformational garden. La Semeuse, the South Central Farm, and The Farm each
provide a means to seek and practice a decolonial thinking. This extends to include a
broader understanding of aesthetics, identity and nature, and social exchange. Implicitly,
this warrants a re-examination of relationship, based on mutual respect instead of
unconscious exercising of grievous hierarchies and, coextensively, preserving the planet
against the ravages of capitalist exploitation.
Transformational gardens play a vital part in deconstructing the shadow of the
nation state, a burden of centuries of conquest and imperialism, to honor a fragile
ecosystem and ostracized peoples in a radically different cultural ecology. Within what is

62

still called democracy, journalist Naomi Klein might very well call this protest:
…citizens have been told to keep their heads down - whether in a consumerist
fantasy world or in poverty and drudgery - and leave leadership to the elites.
Protest is transformative precisely because people emerge, encounter one another
face-to-face, and, in re-learning the habits of freedom, build new institutions,
relationships and organizations.
96

Transformational gardens are a reminder of such achievements and progress
being made today. Within the gardens, disenfranchised populations are treated with
respect. A small redistribution of wealth takes place, a section of land in which to
gather and garden is provided. Gardens are used to negotiate the trauma inflicted by
entrenched systems of power. The spaces are autonomous. All privilege and model
the caring economy, non-monetized social relations that nurture and sustain life,
more akin to a “partnership model” where hierarchies of domination wither. People
are valued as more than an economic unit.
97
Transformational gardens give access to
green space, with all its healing and nourishing capacities. They are pedagogical
spaces that offer a new social contract based on equity, interdependence, human
dignity and worth. Ideally, participants carry this inside to share and extend another
way.
In today’s political landscape, transformational gardens help us to experience
a trajectory of action thoughtful enough to legitimize hope. These gardens are a

96
Naomi Klein, “We May Be Witnessing the First Large Global Conflict Where People Are
Aligned by Consciousness and Not Nation State or Religion,” AlterNet, Nov. 1, 2011,
http://www.alternet.org/activism/152932/we_may_be_witnessing_the_first_large_global_conflict
_where_people_are_aligned_by_consciousness_and_not_nation_state_or_religion/?page=1.

97
While others have certainly used the term “partnership model,” my influence is social historian
Riane Eisler.

63

promising way to promote what the late Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai
described as the three-legged stool, an aphorism she believed the Norwegian Nobel
Committee saw and valued in her work. In Maathai’s logic, the three legs of the
traditional African stool represent the environment, democracy and peace. And
lacking any of those “legs,” the stool cannot perform its function, which is to provide
support. The seat of the stool represents “development, because the citizens who
occupy that space feel secure; they can create, they are sitting on a secure base.”
98

Cycles have proven Maathai’s formula. When resources, such as food or oil,
are lacking or desired, people become vulnerable to subjugation – as workers,
consumers, or as victims of more blatant acts of violence and aggression like war. In
such situations, people can be exposed to outright terror, and democracy may be
trampled to secure what corporations and governments deem necessary. In recent
years, escalating food prices have been the cause of riots all over the world, and they
continue to be a source of ongoing tension and unrest.
Transformational gardens have demonstrated they can be the seat or ‘cradle’ for
much needed future development, stemming not from the increasing monetary yields
familiar within capitalism, but, rather from a new way of maneuvering and defining
“growth”. Maathai’s environmental ‘leg’ includes remediating soil, harvesting rainwater,
and improving air quality. All of these issues fall within the processes of growing and
distributing healthy food. Transformational gardens grow and extend democracy through
helping to include, represent and reflect the voices and needs of people, notwithstanding

98
Jan Cottington, “The Woman Who Plants Peace,” World Ark (Nov./Dec. 2005): 14, accessed
Dec. 10, 2011, http://www.heifer.org/PDF/05%20NovDec%20WA%20.pdf.

64

their economic status or ethnicity. They may buoy disenfranchised neighborhoods to
better the likelihood of a peaceful coexistence, by providing a viable, sustainable
alternative for increasing social well-being and stability.
Transformational gardens are a resolute encouragement to sow new seeds of
sociality, nourishment and language. We are all being encouraged to claim the image of
the Sower gracing the French dictionary and understand our power to help foster ongoing
“vernacular seed exchanges”
99
that buoy direct action in the world. The stakes are
incredibly high. As theorist and educator Henry A. Giroux suggests: “The search for a
new politics and a new critical language that crosses a range of theoretical divides must
reinvigorate the relationship between democracy, ethics, and political agency by
expanding the meaning of the pedagogical as a political practice.”
100
And, vice versa, the
political as a pedagogical practice.
Transformational gardens can be understood within a new system, which is
“building a living, open core where artists leverage their symbolic power in tune with
growing social movements.”
101
These gardens are part of a historical trajectory of
instigating for social reforms, and can be seen in solidarity with such practices the world

99
Claire Pentecost, “Fields of Zombies: Biotech Agriculture and the Privatization of Knowledge.”
Essay written for Companion Planting for Social and Biological Systems: agriArt event at George
Mason University, Apr. 21–May 15, 2009. Pentecost’s text is archived at Flawed Art,
http://www.flawedart.net/agriart/pentecost.html.

100
Henry A. Giroux, “Dangerous Pedagogy in the Age of Casino Capitalism and Religious
Fundamentalism,” Truthout.org, Feb. 29, 2012, http://www.truth-out.org/dangerous-pedagogy-
age-casino-capitalism-and-religious-fundamentalism/1330459170.

101
Pentecost, “Fields of Zombies.”

65

over. Transformational gardens are now being historicized by institutions, which can help
to educate about the symbolic benefit and the multiple practical advantages of these
practices, as well as to encourage greater equity in praising the diversity of knowledges
inherent within.
Just as the movement of commodities presupposes a demand, for an artwork
something similar happens where it must conform to an established, shared
language of representation in order to be understood as art when it travels. It
could even be said that this protocol has superseded the role of the exhibition
space in deciding what can be presented as art.
102

As gardeners, artists and educators, as cultural producers, if we are willing we all have
the opportunity to plant seeds to spur on such reform or radical change.

102
Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, and Anton Kuan Wood, introduction to e-flux 33 (Mar. 2012),
http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/e-flux-journal-issue-33-out-now/.

66

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract A growing need to address sustainable agriculture and food security has influenced cultural producers to embrace gardening as social practice. Gardening spaces are engaged environments that foster new ways of relating

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Asset Metadata

Creator Behrstock, Allison Danielle (author)

Core Title A commitment to our shared destiny: transformational gardens and a vision of equity

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/09/2012

Defense Date 04/08/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Barefoot College,biodiversity,climate change,cultural diversity,food deserts,immigration,Marjetica Potrc,OAI-PMH Harvest,socially engaged art,South Central Farms,sustainability,urban gardening

Language English

Advisor Driggs, Janet Owen (committee member), Hofmann, Irene (committee member), Wedell, Noura (committee member)

Creator Email adbehrstock@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-36727

Unique identifier UC11288390

Identifier usctheses-c3-36727 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BehrstockA-822.pdf

Dmrecord 36727

Document Type Thesis

Rights Behrstock, Allison Danielle

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA