Collective de Onkruidenier (consisting of Ronald Boer, Jonmar van Vlijmen and Rosanne van Wijk) will begin the development of The Shadow Garden in the walled Belgian Cloister garden – put in our care by the municipality as part of the Vrije Ruimte policy – in the Amstelpark in the spring of 2022. In collaboration with Zone2Source, local residents and other interested parties, they will conduct research and artistic experiments using this walled garden and the rest of the park as an experimental garden. Working on a speculative ecosystem as artwork, and imagining more relational systems of classification, they will explore how alternative nature-culture stories can lead to different kind of practices of care.
New connections between plants, people and nature in the city will provide park visitors with a totally different experience of what urban nature can be and how we shape our cities in the future. This is called Future Gardening. The aim is to search for new forms of presentation by developing hidden stories from the park – focusing on diverse cultural connections to plants – and sharing them with a multicultural and multispecies community.
Public events will take place to tell new nature-culture stories together and reflect on our relationships to plants and gardening. Every Wednesday morning between 10 a.m. and noon, the collective is at work in the garden and invites visitors to stop by.
The Shadow Garden is an ongoing project by de Onkruidenier and Zone2Source that will launch during the Shadow Floriade as part of Our Living Soil.
The Shadow Garden in the Belgian Cloister garden
