During a full moon weekend, on the evening of May 30 and the day of the 31st, artists, gardeners, farmers, researchers and enthousiasts gathered in two artists gardens of Zone2Source, a testing ground on art and ecology in an urban park in Amsterdam, to engage in experiments rethinking our relationship to soil and the garden as active participants in ecosystems.

When is art a garden, and when is gardening art? While the garden for centuries was an important inspiration for artists, more recently it is no longer the representation of the garden but gardening as artistic practice that has surfaced in contemporary art dealing with ecological inquiries. While still appearing as a micro-world in which concerns of the world at large are being depicted and a new world foreshadowed, the garden and gardening has become a site and a practice for artists to reshape our relations with our living environment. Questions such as, what is gardening as an intervention when we imagine the garden as a place for multispecies collaboration, and how do we humans participate constructively as material, spiritual and relational bodies in the garden, means actively exploring our role in ecosystems while acknowledging the need for cultural transformation at the heart of ecological crisis.

The garden as art and art as gardening
Zone2Source as a testing ground for art and ecology in an urban park, that once was designed for a world exhibition on horticulture, the 1972 Floriade. We inhabit these modern and colonial spaces, which brought together flora and fauna from all over the world in one place and one soil, differently, exploring alternative imaginations and practices of living and being in a shared world through artistic imaginary and practice. Offering our glass pavilions, artist gardens and outdoor spaces as a living lab to artists for research and projects around ecological inquiries, we create spaces for collaborative public human and more-than-human meaning-making and learning through embodied and artistic methods.

Gardens have become increasingly integral to Amsterdam’s cultural landscape. Many art spaces have developed gardens alongside their exhibition programs, while artists adopt gardening itself as an artistic practice. At the same time, community gardens have proliferated across the city, often blurring the boundary between collective cultivation and artistic research. What these initiatives share is a desire to cultivate different relationships with the earth. These developments formed the backdrop to the second Gardener’s Assembly (the first one took place during the exhibition Future Gardening: Gardening as artistic practice for multispecies worldbuilding late 2024 and was the start of an ongoing Future Gardening exchange network in Amsterdam) organized as part of Future Gardening @ Soil Assembly, an event supported by the Horizon Europe program SoilTribes. This two-day program invited artists, gardeners, researchers and local communities to explore gardening as a shared cultural and ecological practice.

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