May 19, 2017

Collaborative intervention: socially engaged foraging & eating/interactive mobile video projection

An intervention by Rebecca Garrett into Linda Duvall’s In The Hole residency project sponsored by Paved Arts and written about in Galleries West magazine.

Project description: Telling stories around a fire in a hole dug in the ground while plant swapping and food sharing.

Participants were  invited to bring some food, edible item or plant that relates to the land they inhabit/are on. The edible/plant item was shared around a fire that is in a hole that has been dug in land that has never been tilled. Participants were invited to share stories about, or inspired by, the item they have brought to share.

As participants shared plants/food and stories, the present knowledge that was generated was ritualistically buried into the layers of the earth in hope for future generations. Like a time capsule to be excavated at a future date, like seed saving: the burying of integral knowledge for future survivance. This is done in the face of the anthropocence – the current devastation of the earth that confronts us with an unknown destiny. To carve the present known into the future unknown.

The telling within a hole in the ground as ameliorative, restorative, healing of other spaces or other holes made, for instance, by spaces of extraction (such as mining) that are bringing climate disaster/ anthropocene.

The following night, images of the heart of the fire were projected into the hole, accompanied by the stories told (and recorded where permission is granted) to create a ghostly evocation to which all are welcome.

Lead artist Rebecca Garrett offered a story to share of her mother. During the depression, she learned to wildcraft edible wild plants as a survival strategy, eventually authoring a cookbook based on this knowledge practice. As incursion of monoculture factory farming and of corporate Monsanto agriculture into southern Ontario, Rebecca and her mother would go out on the land to collect native plants to transplant onto their land. They clung to a practice based on their relation to land and survival, to knowledge and cultural meaning. Bringing the experience of these holes left behind as plants are dug up, into dialogue with the hole, which is the present site of this gathering.