About II

Our main instructor in this project Maria Hellström Reimer has written a great text for the exhibition catalogue. Read and enjoy!

 

What does the White House lawn have in common with a demolition site in Havana? Or with a horse paddock in Wanås for that matter? The answer is fertile grounds.

 A little while ago Michelle Obama put the shovel in the grounds. Media reported on how she, together with a group of fifth gradestudents dug up the manicured lawn just outside the presidential residence to give room for broccoli, spinach, onion, peas, carrots, fennel, borecole, and chard.

The fact that well kept lawns in Washington now have to make way for something as basic as vegetable gardening is not just the result of yet another health trend. The reason is more political than that. In a country like the US, where obesity and diabetes are widely spread and the intake of junk food has become a class symbol, the new vegetable garden has an educational and sociopolitical dimension.

 Meanwhile, Michelle Obama’s digging is more than a domestic concern. It is an act of solidarity that in a very concrete way connects the soil of Washington, with that of, say, Havana. Here, the gardening of the urban landscape, for natural reasons, has come further. The many parcelos of the Cuban capital, or urban allotments, grew out of the collapse of the Soviet Union and a direct response to the immediate food crisis. When the import of artificial fertilizers and basic food items was brought to a stop, a radical reconstruction of the agriculture took place, from large and chemically demanding to small-scale and organic. This development has been successful in Cuba. Today the organopónicos in Havana, the small urban and organic gardens, provide for up to 90 % of the city’s need for fruit and vegetables.

 In a similar way, the project The Allotment Plot, uses gardening as the starting point for a physical approach to the concept of “crisis” and the idea about “change”. With the allotment as a founding principle, a group of landscape-architect students from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp engage themselves in what could be described as our time’s most persistent and difficult conceptions.

 Even if obesity is not as widespread in Sweden and even if we can still enjoy our tomatoes in the winter at a reasonable price, it has slowly started seeping in – the feeling of unsustainability. How “green” am I? Do I take responsibility for my waste? How do I compensate for my footprint? These are questions that make us lower our heads in shame. Or it stirs up a counter reaction: What do you mean by green? We are not worms; we are humans – adaptable, inventive, technically advanced, mobile, and rational thinking beings!

 At the same time there is an increase in awareness that everything is connected. The thought of cosmos is still valid, but perhaps in a new way. Perhaps we misunderstood “green” when we reduced it to biological case studies, nutritious raw material or organic systems. That we have not fully understood the potential and importance of being green, as an integrated part of ourselves and our own human culture.

 Within the frame of The Allotment Plot these thoughts will develop, from passive contemplation to a garden-activist movement, to a creative plot, where organic guilt can be transformed into cosmological distributive action. In the center of this movement stands the mobile box pallet, with its standardized collars, a symbol of the global consumer society. Here this logistic servant will be transformed in a reasonable pocket of opportunities, a box, at any time ready to be put into a green offensive.

 From Wanås, the simple grid of cultivation will propagate and spread out over the world. As such, it will propose a reflection on the relationship between nature and culture but also a reflection on what is perhaps the most significant marker of our time – our global consciousness. To be meaningful this consciousness should go beyond the local context and the individual perspective, to include aspects such as sharing global resources, environmental justice and a long-term responsibility.

 When the first lady, wearing black rubber boots, decisively turns the first shovel of dirt, it is not only an historical event, but also a part of The Allotment Plot. It is a movement which, according to media, has already reached California. There, the first lady of the state, Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger, has not been late to catch on the new trend. And surely, as a local intervention, gardening can – regardless of how small it may be and on whose land it might happen – act as an atoning contribution to a green household. As a relational act, however, gardening is more than a mediagesture that allows us to temporary lift our heads. It is a transforming plot, a worldpolitical act which sheds light on the shift in which gardening goes from being useful extraction to becoming “culture” – an exchange of experiences on what it means to be a world citizen.