Garden as Studio is a series of events which offer a platform for explorations of the Ponderosa garden, land, and ecologies as a space for artistic practices, facilitated by Shelley Etkin.
2018 – 2022 (ongoing)
Ponderosa: Stolzenhagen, Germany
www.ponderosa-dance.de/garden-as-studio.html
2018:
Occuring in rough alignment with the Spring and Autumn equinoxes.
Garden as Studio: DIG: March 30 – April 1, 2018
Dig deep. Spring equinox — Easter or Ostara. A time of rebirth, emergence, beginnings of a new growing season.
Cracking open the vaults of winter dreamtime, we may find bulbs laying dormant, restless to bud. Turning the soil: an audacious probing, a disturbance — or making space for possibility?
We will use shovels as divination rods. Digging will anchor our embodied practices. Psychic portals, visualizations, open questions, and plant meditations will guide our time. We will get low, quiet, and close to the soil. What seeds want to grow and what has decomposed? We intend to co-create with the Ponderosa land, to listen and dig deep.
Garden as Studio: Gather: September 14 – 16, 2018
More information coming.
2017
Four weekend series at
Ponderosa: August – September, 2017
I. Land Listening : Shelley Etkin &
Laura Burns
We will explore reading-listening as a divinatory, conversational, relational act of faith. How does the land respond to our listening, and how does the space between bodies become activated for responsivity?
Laura Burns is an interdisciplinary artist, asking how performance can blur the spiritual and material, invoking the agency of the nonhuman world. Focussing on the relationship between sound and intuition in site-specific research, her work looks at multiple ways of knowing, witchy methodologies, somatic-shamanic explorations into place-thought, and the relationship between language and bodies.
II. Human Gardening : Shelley Etkin &
Jared Gradinger
Plant communication, plant devas, plant wisdom. Spiritual & co-creative science. Soil-less gardening. Gardens as space, as performance, as choreography, as social art. Biodynamic energetics. Practical esoterics.
How can we approach art-making as a form of gardening and gardening as an artistic practice?
Shelley Etkin and
Jared Gradinger come together as gardeners, spiritual weirdos, and dance makers.
III. Garden of Others : Shelley Etkin &
Anniina Ala-Ruona
How is gardening a feminist practice? Where do radical/anarchist/guerrilla methods of squatting tread into colonial practices of occupation? How do queerness and otherness operate in the world of a garden?
This workshop will explore these questions through practices including embodied gardening work, psychic dreaming, and a devotion to the non-human. Our practices derive from a squatted garden in Helsinki. We strive to hold an open space for being together.
‘Garden of Others’ is a collaborative research project by Shelley Etkin,
Anniina Ala-Ruona & many others.
IV. Ecology & Performance Open School : MAGPIE
This is an experiment in pedagogy, ways of knowledge, learning and researching. What could a school of ecology and performance be? Who are the students, the teachers, the curriculum?
This will be facilitated by the group of so-called students in a so-called M.A. in Ecology & Contemporary Performance pilot program from the so-called institution of the Theatre Academy in Helsinki, Finland. Transplanted and combusted, we will open questions of schooling and see what happens.