4 –5 October opening weekend with a debate and workshops as part of Gedeeld Domein 

Amsterdam is home to almost 1 million people. But besides people, there are trillions of other creatures: plants, animals, insects, who each run their lives in the city in their own way. How do we deal with a city of trillions of lives instead of 1 million inhabitants? During Future Gardening: gardening as artistic practice for multispecies worldbuilding, we practice alternative scenarios for multispecies politics of the city. The various artist gardens of Zone2Source form a micro world where artists take people along in experimenting with alternative experiences and ways of doing things that are necessary for life on a shared earth.

Throughout time, many artists have been inspired by the garden and have depicted it in different ways, expressing changing societal beliefs and philosophies on mankind’s relation to nature.  Contemporary artists not only work to present new representations and imaginations, but employ gardening itself as an artistic strategy stemming from a desire to actively reshape our relationship with (the) earth. If we no longer view the garden as a blank canvas on which to project our plans, but instead as a space filled with life, how do we then shape gardening as a co-creative intervention? What experiences, languages and behaviours are needed to tend and adapt to our environment, instead of controlling and manipulating it? How do we deal with public space – design, planning, maintenance – from a position of radical inclusivity in which we listen to all voices in the city, and what does eating and being eaten mean from a multispecies solidarity?

We invited the artists of our three ongoing artist gardens – de Onkruidenier, Genomic Gastronomy and Theun Karelse – to develop a growing exhibition of art works that relate to gardening as artistic practice with manifold relations to the project gardens in the park, activated by a series of events, talks and workshops.