PLANT as a garden
Penelope Iliaskou
PLANT was created on a ground, ploughed in the course of fruitful past collaborations between three artistic entities, CRL – O’Porto, Portugal, nyamnyam – Mieres, Catalunya/ Spain, and Duncan Dance Research Center – Athens, Greece.
Based in different geographical, topological, historical and social contexts but driven by common views towards our interconnected living in the arts, the three partners revisited Raymond Duncan’s philosophical take of Actionalism and, 120 years later, in an environment, once again, prone to perturbations and changes, activated “actionalism” it in the now, triggering new articulations, in new iterations.
The curatorial threads and artistic design of the programme revolved around crafting shared spaces, questioning and transforming patterns rooted in each partner’s context while engaging with new forms shaped out of the process.
Which are the points of access to each territory?
How do we transform space into a place?
Which are its (h)edges?
Which would be its internal structure and fabric so that the artistic practice could find
its roots and growth?
Where, when, how do we schedule the succession “planting” of actions?
The labour that precedes and traverses this process, constantly relating to the questions revealed by the contexts, is at the same time physical, mental, and emotional and highlights the pivotal role of time in all the programme’s seasons: Time to spent in the area we plan to work with; Time to observe the site and its patterns, to understand the interactions between the members of its communities; Time to recognize the needs, working with them and seeing the solutions formed out of these necessities; Time to build together with the artists' spots of encounter with their body of work and with the public; Time to connect, together with local communities, with new meanings of their territory; Time to celebrate the yield of seeing them better connected and attuned to the places.
Along PLANT, the seeds stored from the Duncan’s heritage were re-planted and tested in three different social and cultural microclimates of the European South. A diversity of encounters, talks, writings, craft practices, events, micro-actions and larger openings to the public unfolded throughout the 2 years. Practices and resources harvested from the various places where the actions took place, were subsequently kept or utilized, cycled or composted, in our concern for contrasting the volatile nature of artistic works and creating durable bonds with places and people involved. In parallel, we took care of other formats, besides the formal ones, such as interdisciplinary encounters, unexpected collaborations, online conferences with local or overseas practitioners…, a series of informal settings, living between or at the edges, places that we tend or risk to lose sight of.
In the course of the programme, a complex, rich web of relationships was gradually woven. - the curatorial process, the researchers’ accompaniment, the connections with the local communities, the artistic residencies and projects running through PLANT grew all interrelated and interdependent, allowing seasons to take their course, allowing ups and downs, providing the conditions for pollination, and allowing time to form mycelia of connection and exchange, bringing us closer to an ecology of interaction and togetherness.
After all, as Catarina Veira writes in her text, “Life and answers are happening here and now, in the disarming proximity of the time we spend together”.
P. S.
As previous Artistic Director of the DDRC (the I. and R. Duncan Dance Research Center) (2000-2023), I witnessed and participated in the creation and care of a garden which was growing along and beside the artistic projects and encounters curated by the institution. It is, actually, what remains vivid today, in a transitory stage of turmoil for the institution.
Foucault called the garden ‘heterotopia’, that is, an environment that gathers different ‘overlapping meanings’ and forms -a miniature of the world. PLANT was also seen by us all from its very beginning as a garden - an invitation to care about what is within and around us. The garden provided us with its language, its tools and methods and showed us that practice happens in the body, in the building, in the place, in our artistic work, in the community: "It is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world”.