Contextualizing Political Power through Gardens and Soil
An Article by Ervin Smajič
In my highschool years, I would often attend protests against the social welfare cuts which were imposed as a result of austerity-driven policies by neoliberal governments who were in power at that time in Slovenia. One day when I arrived home, I encountered my mother in the garden behind our house. Proudly, I approached her and asked if she wanted to join me at the next protesting event as we need to fight for the future of people like us, working-class families who unlike banks are “too small not to fail” and would hence be most vulnerable in this economic crisis that was spreading around Europe at that time. She looked at me and wisely replied: “Politics is just like gardening; you will not solve anything by shouting ‘Long live Slovenia and its peoples!’ just like you cannot solve anything by shouting ‘Long live my garden and its flowers!’ It is the gardener with his spade and hard-work who shapes the future of the garden and same goes for a working-class person.”
Following that, I realized that as much as gardens tend to be admired as tranquil public and private spaces where one can escape from the world of politics and experience equanimity, it is nonetheless completely opposite. Gardens are a main component of our everyday social life and have been a subject of political and philosophical debates for ages. It is of no surprise if we caught ourselves reflecting on our romantic desires in gardens or contemplating metaphysical “truths”. It is the garden which reflects our erotic, moral and philosophical desires, but importantly, gardens also reflect the condition of society. It is precisely the relationship between gardens and the condition of society that is at the center of this project. Specifically, I am interested in how gardens can contextualize political power and serve as a political spectacle; and to answer this I will interview and have a conversation with two of my friends at NYU Abu Dhabi, Michelle and Alex, who both have extensive experiences with gardening and cultivating soil and have thought about the political function of gardens in a deep, profound and judicious way.
Michelle is a senior at NYU Abu Dhabi, majoring in Interactive Media. Besides digital technology, she is also very passionate about gardening and the environment. Last summer, she worked at NYU Urban Farm Lab, a farm, where students learn how to grow, care for, and harvest seasonal edible crops in an urban environment. Before talking to her about the role, I’ve dived extensively into academic readings that outlined the evolutionary role gardens and first agricultural cities played in the development of human kind. In particular, I was interested in her views on collective farming and equal distribution — an idea de facto very pleasant to our ears, but in practice very difficult to implement, recent history shows that collective farming has been successful to a certain degree but has unfortunately failed many times on a large scale [Soviet Union and kolkhoz-collectivist agricultural system]. Michelle was very vocal in her belief that the modern technology might resolve the failure of collectivist planning and that not collectivist, but moderately a fairer, social-democratic way of distributing and producing food, is absolutely needed as climate change persists, temperatures grow and arable land reduces in size significantly. She notes, however, that for her, gardens and soil are more than just food producing pieces of land but rather of a public arena where many other themes are discussed and thoroughly analyzed through work. Urban agriculture, according to her, explores larger themes, such as food justice, culture, racial identity, gender relations as well as philosophy.
On the other side, Alex, a senior from Wales, has more conservative views when it comes to land ownership. To him, individual control over the land ownership is crucial from an economic multi-utilization point of view; one tends to work hardest when he/she knows they will reap the benefits and that benefits will not be socialized. However, he was in favor of stronger public funding of war memorial gardens and public parks. With regards to this argument, I’ve offered him a counterpoint mentioned by philosopher Pogue Harrison; grandiose war memorial gardens and parks such as Nanjing Memorial Garden and Yasukuni Shrine, often tend not to place full attention solely on piety and the suffering of victims, but rather serve as a political spectacle that have an aim of creating new metaphysical and historical truth through gardens and soil. Alex agreed with me on the peril of creating historic truths through gardens and soil — he has brought up an example from his country, Wales, where the Conservatives and some right-wing political parties have decided to repeatedly bring up an example of how old variety of English apple tree lost its potency when mixing with other varieties; a metaphor used to illustrate the dangers of immigration according to them. We’ve both ended up agreeing that gardens are not solely aesthetic public spaces or horticultural pieces of land but are also spaces of continuing political and philosophical education
To conclude with, I must admit that this project has taught me a lot and that I have utterly enjoyed it. Namely, in the process of preparing for interviews with my colleagues, I had to learn from scratch about vertical farming, urban farming and have even learned new information about some of the species such as apple tree, making this journey informative, joyful while at the same time cool from a perspective I got to learn more about what my friends did throughout the summer in detail.
