Wild Co-Design
Artist and researcher Aron Weber, alongside a group of creative practitioners, worked with children from across Alexander McLeod Primary School and Abbey Wood Nursery School to co-design an outdoor studio and planting scheme. Inspired by visits to the Barbican and Design Museum, the studio encourages a sense of calmness and a safe, quiet space for children to come together during playtime to draw, read or create. Children developed a sense of ownership of these reimagined spaces and an awareness of the numerous inhabitants of the garden such as pollinators and predators.
Through the series of workshops the children were exposed to a diverse range of makers and practices. With co-production being the central theme tying the activities together, they have learned about community centered design that produces space for the needs of its users, and have become stakeholders in the workshop programme as well as the garden itself. Focusing on learning through play, they developed their initial concepts for the garden through producing performances, short films and zines about their design. Iterating week over week, the children refined and concretised the direction they wanted the workshops to go, learning from practicing artists and place-makers.
This culminated in the production of deck chairs with a custom printed cyanotype fabric that provides a living archive of the children who worked on the project. This responded to the need for more sitting and relaxation space raised by the children, while the curtains on the pavilion create a more secluded and domestic space for reflection. All elements of the project were designed to be easily repairable to encourage continuous care for the garden.
The project aimed at immersing children not only in contemporary art and making practices, but in making them the curators and creators of the outdoor studio and sensory garden, with the aim that this deeper engagement with the space will foster a lasting sense of ownership and care.
Aanchal Saxena
In Aanchal’s workshop, the children were familiarised with the practice of Transentience, a practice of empathetic role-play, connecting with urban nature amid climate and ecological crises, which she developed during her MA at the Bartlett School of Architecture. The children imagined the garden from the perspective of its non-human inhabitants, such as plants, animals and insects. The wishing tree constructed from the perspective of bugs and animals that live in the garden engaged them about the circular material culture and biodiversity of the garden, while providing essential input in the final design of the space.
Barbican
The children visited the Unravel textile exhibition at the Barbican Centre in preparation for the slowmotion workshop with Wei-Ting Ma. They have learned about domestic practices of care and low cost, low carbon interventions into public spaces. They reflected on the connection between textiles and communities, which would later reappear as a central element in the design of the garden. The cyanotype lounge chairs and curtains echo the continuous care and engagement with the living environment of the garden.
Wei-Ting Ma
The stop-motion short films were created in a workshop by Wei-Ting Ma, after visiting the Unravel exhibition at the Barbican Centre. The films imagine the garden as a fertile ground for exploration and play, providing a set for the myriad stories of its inhabitants. Reconstructing the garden as a theatre of life, the children produced a blueprint for the final shape of the project. Exploring the endless possibilities and alternative interventions into the space, the children were engaged in the process of thinking through making, echoing practice-led research methods in architectural planning.
Peas Press
Peas Press held a fast-response zine workshop lending their invaluable experience from teaching printmaking at the MA Design Expanded Practice course at Goldsmiths. They delivered a talk on the history of zines and pamphlets, teaching children about the importance of circulating written ephemera and its roots in community-centred practice. The children then learned to create their own zines about the topics important to them, which now live in the garden providing an archive of the people involved in the project. The aim of this workshop was to equip the children with the tools of circulating ideas and capture their thoughts.
The second workshop by Peas Press involved creating prints using LEGOs, which responded to the stop-motion animation films produced by the children, taught them about traditional, low-cost printing techniques. The prints created through the workshop were then the base of the final cyanotype printed fabrics that make the garden more welcoming and domestic.
Maxi Himpe
In Maxi’s workshop the children returned to the idea of the garden as a space for performance. The activities relied on their imagination to reshape and reconstruct the garden. Learning about the connection between public space and performance, they reflected on how the project is not only physically reconstructing the garden, but is reconfiguring how they relate to it and what they use it for. The children took part in exercises that made them aware of their positionality within the garden. Using the workshop to fuel their ability to imagine new futures, the children became the designers of the plan for the garden, gaining the ability to imagine new ways of being together with nature.
Jessy Solomon
Jessy shared her practice of biomaterial production and locally-sourced ceramic making. They created Blobsters that watch over and care for the garden, while contributing to the physical memory embedded in the space. They were created from clay made from the garden itself, mixed with clay from various ecological sites around London, teaching the children about material processes and eco-friendly practices. Using materials already present in the garden highlighted both the intrinsic creative potential of the space and made them learn about circular materials and low-carbon practices.
Design Museum
In preparation for the reopening of the garden space, the children visited the Enzo Mari exhibition at the Design Museum, where they learned about design for play and interaction. Getting ready to finish reconstructing the garden, they learned about the complex practices of curating and presenting objects that were made to be used. This prepared them for the relaunch of the space, and situated their involvement in the project as co-producers and co-curators.
Artists
Aanchal Saxena
Aanchal is a creative producer and arts practitioner working with themes of sustainability and fostering new ways of connecting to urban nature. In her project, If I Were A Mulberry Tree, she brought together gardeners, local residents, students and all the non-human creatures of St. George’s gardens. She has held workshops and directed a short film in which the participants were guided to perform transentince, a radical new way to form meaningful connections with the nature we are embedded in.
www.resistanceisfertile.cargo.site
Wei-Ting Ma
Wei-Ting Ma is a Taiwanese artist and architectural designer based in London, whose works focus on social engagement and site-specific performance. By actively participating in the local scene and engaging with communities, she aims to give voice to objects and foster connections between human and non-human agencies. This is achieved through artistic animation film, live performance, and installation in situ using hands-on methodologies. Inspired by Donna Haraway's concept of 'kinship', Wei-Ting infuses found objects with vitality. These objects engage storytelling and site-specific intervention to cultivate empathy and raise environmental awareness.
www.wasteagency.cargo.site
Peas Press
Peas Press is a printing and publishing collective formed in 2021 at Goldsmiths University by Sheng-Jung Tsai, Lara Baillargeon and Isabela Chipon. Driven by a shared passion for printed matter, Peas Press experiments with printing methods, illustration, animation, photography and graphic design. Our collective works with posters, zines, publications, celebratory postcards and T-shirts. From commissions to self initiated projects, Peas Press has taken part in zine fairs hosted by PageMasters, F.A.T. Studio and StickyFingers.
www.instagram.com/peas_press
Maxi Himpe
Maxi Himpe is a performance director, interviewer, and interdisciplinary artist. They direct genre-spanning work, including cabaret, new writing, adaptations, and verbatim work.Various works have previously been presented at the Thames Festival, the Barbican, Camden Fringe and Oakland Theater Project. Queer sensibility and the question of what art can do for society pervade everything they do. They are a Trustee at the Greenwich Docklands International Festival and work in the Social Practice department at the Association for Cultural Advancement through Visual Art (ACAVA).
Jessy Harper-Solomon
Jessy is an ecological designer and artist, making things and making things happen.
Working across disciplines, she advocates for a holistic design approach. Her work investigates and constructs alternative narratives of systems, ecologies and social structures via process-driven, active methods of enquiry. With a respect for slow and cyclic regenerative practices, she often works collaboratively using making and craft to ask critical questions. She is excited by the potential of design to challenge how we live and offer ways in which we might live better.
www.jessyharpersolomon.com
Aron Weber
Aron is artist, curator and researcher focusing on exploring the convergence of infrastructure, communication and simulation technologies Focusing on a handful of mediums, such as artists’ moving image, generative audio installations and a community-engaged practice, interrogating the effects of hyper-accelerated digital capitalism on the built environment.Using art and research practice to push against conformist narratives used to present the pervasive logic of techno-capitalist commodification as the natural progression of the world, his works have been exhibited at the Barbican, the Building Centre and Leicester-Sunway International Festival.
www.aronweber.co.uk
