Slow practices of autonomy and regeneration
with Ana Barbu in Uzura Garden
Saturday, 21 June 2025
Hours 15:00 – 20:00
Manasia commune, Ialomița county
From spring to autumn, four different gardens located in close proximity to Bucharest engage in an exchange of seeds, practices and experiences in cultivating and relating as part of the project Cultivators of Life. Starting with a spring session of exchanging seeds and further documenting the growing processes, throughout summer and autumn each gardener opens their space to a public, invited to observe, learn and engage with the knowledge of plants and their network of relationality. Each event is choreographed following each garden’s particular conditions and contexts, as well as each gardener’s own sensibility, expertise and experiences. The process and events are documented by three young harvesters through different media: writing (Irina Bobei), illustration (Maria Doni), and video (Gabriela Cozma).
The first open garden event begins with Ana Barbu, who for ten years has been growing, in a slow process of learning and unlearning, a garden of biodiversity in a 600 sq m land located in Manasia commune, approximately 60 km north-east of Bucharest. For the event, Ana Barbu will invite participants to read together a reflective essay about the garden, followed by walks guided by texts, questions and sensorial and imaginative exercises to connect to plants and the soil that grounds them.
“Next year the garden turns ten, but it was still a garden when my grandparents used to live here, even though they only grew vegetables and vine, and I restructured everything around here, the soil was treated very well throughout their lifetime. Ten years for a garden means it passed the stage of infancy but it is still not a mature garden. It is a liminal age when the trees start resembling what they will become, the perennials lay in a certain logic which only time can write. I know what goes where in this place, the underlayer, where the wind blows, the temperatures all year round, when it rains or not, with whom I live in cohabitation, more or less harmoniously. Certainly, I have absolutely nothing under control.
My work involves making experiments of all sorts in regards to organic and regenerative farming techniques to produce my own portion of food, a difficult thing considering that I don’t use chemical treatments. In the middle of these endless monocultural fields of Pioneer, Dupont and Monsanto seeds, insects and organisms became extremely fierce and resilient. I miss the autonomy my grandparents had. They seemed to possess all necessary instruments to enjoy a life without dependency on complex political and economic systems, funding applications, suppliers and external validations. They knew how to repair stuff, to grow, transform and find meaning in simple and basic things. The garden was their entire world, the kitchen a laboratory, and their hands knowledge archives. It is not about individual self-sufficiency, but about belonging to a dense network of relations between humans, land, tools, seasons and other beings.
One of my biggest pleasures here in the garden is to make various decorative plant combinations based on textures, colors, blooming period, where and how the light falls based on each season. My love for decorative plants began from a permaculture technique which implies having a rich variety of plants and using companions to beat back insects, microorganisms, or to attract pollinators. In the meantime, it became an aesthetic and affective thing. Sometimes I wait for years for a specific combination to work, I often fail or many times something incredible happens, something totally unexpected grows and reconfigures everything. The garden is alive, it’s my life and thinking partner. It’s different every day. The joys only last briefly so it doesn’t make sense to cling on to them. I know they will come back, albeit in a different shape. Because here time does not pass, it is not wasted. It cultivates and regenerates.”
- Ana Barbu
The event is part of the program Cultivators of Life, a multianual project organized by Tranzit.ro/Bucharest Association and co-financed by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The program continues and supports the activities started in 2021 at the Experimental Research Station for Research on Art and Life in Siliștea Snagovului, focused on conserving biodiversity, testing ecological prototypes, and rethinking the relationship between soils, materials and artistic production. Curated by Adelina Luft, the program proposes the study and formulation of a new lexicon and practices related to an emerging relationship between indigenous/ancestral knowledge, land cultivation and natural sciences, realized through a series of artistic residencies, open events in gardens around Bucharest, applied workshops, conferences with indigenous thinkers and a final group in 2026 at MODEM – Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen.
The program does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the program's content or any use to which the program outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
