FUTURE GARDENING
by Onkruidenier (Amsterdam)
Saturday, 25 July
15:00 – 19:00
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Intr. Primăverii 10, Siliștea Snagovului
GPS coordinates
De Onkruidenier is a Dutch artist collective exploring the evolving relationship between humans and ecosystems through artistic research, installations, performances, and sensory experiences. Their current artistic research investigates how genetic biodiversity is shaped, displaced, preserved, and reimagined through agriculture, food cultures, and ecological change.
Future Gardening is an ongoing artistic practice by De Onkruidenier that explores gardening as a multisensory method for engaging with ecological futures. Rather than cultivating a garden, we cultivate ways of observing and attuning ourselves to the ecosystems we inhabit.
Through collective observation, participants are invited to reflect on their own role within the ecosystem and to explore how gardening can become a practice for engaging with questions of genetic biodiversity. By working with soil, geology, wild plants and seasonal rhythms, we investigate how ecological relationships are cultivated.
At the Experimental Station, Future Gardening focuses on the ecological memory embedded in wild plants and the local geology, exploring how these living archives relate to contemporary food systems. Together, we will search for stories, species, and relationships that become part of the installation On the Same Ribbon at MODEM in Debrecen.
What can wild plants teach us about the future of food? Where is genetic diversity preserved today? Has the supermarket become an unexpected archive of genetic biodiversity?
Supported by: Mondriaan Fonds
Short bio
Collective de Onkruidenier investigates historical, cultural and potential transformations of nature and its possibilities to evolve humans. They do fieldwork – often in conjunction with audiences – collecting plants, the stories and histories associated with them. As ecosystem futurists, they speculate on the relationship between humans and (urban) nature, both above and below sea level. An important role is played here by questioning systems that are usually taken for granted. In the development of their work, interactions with the public and experts such as farmers, residents and scientists create new stories.
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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.
tranzit.ro/Bucharest is part of tranzit.org network. The main partner of tranzit.org is ERSTE Foundation.
