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+The garden is a site-specific work carried out in the intermediate space between the buildings in Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Limburg. The latest version of the garden is unearthed by artist Nickie Sigurdsson and maintained in cooperation with participants, five Indian runner ducks, private seeds savers, and with generous support and guidance from farmer Wim Storken and horticulturist Yvonne Velthuis.
-'Make a garden before you build a house' is a site-specific work carried out in the intermediate space between the buildings in Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Limburg. The latest version of the garden is unearthed by artist Nickie Sigurdsson and maintained in cooperation with participants, five Indian runner ducks, private seeds savers, and with generous support and guidance from farmer Wim Storken and horticulturist Yvonne Velthuis.
+In autumn 2021 Covid had kicked in again and the Jan Van Eyck Academie, went into full lockdown. On a systemic level, the pandemic has rendered visible the dysfunctional ways in which our work influence our lives and allowed for some unsolicited reflection on these matters. Although I found myself privileged to attend my studio practice almost during the entire pandemic, I felt the global state of things aggravated my own thoughts around work and care significantly, and highlighted both a personal and planetary state of exhaustion. In this time we were also re-arranging the way we worked in my collective, which led us to question the means of artistic production in general. I started wondering how I could defy material accumulation, how my work could welcome transient circumstanes, and how a caring scaffolding would inform the way I work in general.
-"Something that we never did during my studies in agriculture was questioning the act of cultivation itself. I have a lot of doubt about (call it) farming although I have a lot of desire towards peasantry as well. Both doubt and desire is hard for me to orientate myself in sometimes. I come to think of the cottage core movement circulating on the internet, where youngsters aesthetisize and dream of a queer community in the countryside opposing capitalist hegemonies once and for all. In reality they rarely take the step. I can relate to the romanticisation wrapped in inaction. Still, it is not an easy step to take, there are many obstacles which are very real when you don’t have any savings for example not to mention access to land. Anyway, something that I felt the urge to do was to embody the act of cultivating something as a way to carry thoughts through action, and identify the questioning which would undoubtedly emerge if I allowed it.
+Following this reasoning I decided to initiate a garden on the academic’s ground. Gardening became such a common activity for many during the pandemic, because I think more than anything, the process of gardening is an exercise in observance and maintenance which connect us to a more cyclical way of existence perhaps especially sought for in times of crisis and isolation. I soon realised when I took on the gardening work, that it was like the entire place came to life. I observed that when you show attention to something that generosity will multiply, and almost immediately some participants came to rescue with carrying compost and digging the raised beds, and the whole project started to become more participatory.
-Luisa read me a text called advise for young farmers and in that text many sentences resonated with me but especially one stuck with me: ‘make a garden before you build a house’. Maybe it is because I have been subscribing to an uprooted and precarious lifestyle for the last few years, as many artistic practitioners, and therefore thoughts about dwelling have been particularly present. For me, the sentence also articulates a need for understanding and connecting with the environment, the soil, the critters dwelling there, before you situate yourself somewhere and maybe this act is a far more severe kind of homecoming.
+The process was overwhelming and vulnerable too, because I felt I had engaged in such a big intervention exposed for everyone to watch. Questions like: ’how do you respect the heritage of the place?’, ’How much do you intervene?’ ‘Is disturbance ok?’, ‘is it ok to introduce ducks to the garden’ etc. was very present during the first part of the process.  At some point I guess I realised that I was just continuing a work ascending from others and it made my role seem more like a facilitator co-authoring with a multitude of collaborators non-humans as well as humans present as well as former.
-JvE seemed like a good place to unearth a garden and other things too, especially because I had no actual monetary risk involved, which is exceptionally privileged since most young farmers have to in-debt themselves when they start farming, and do not have the privilege to experiment. Another thing is that the garden had been left in abandonment after the former head of nature lab left the Academie, and I felt a silent invitation to mitigate an intentional act of caretaking to this tiny plot."
+The questioning was important and served as an entry into different problematics, histories, questions and reflections that I am still unfolding, and some of these thoughts I find it hard to pass on, as they somehow need to be embodied and experienced for oneself. However a lot of knowledge were accumulated in this process and I made a wikipedia page and a website archive as an attempt to share this rumination along with practicalities and therewith encourage others to embody land based work and knowledge for themselves and a new generation of participants to carry on this work. Finally addressing anyone involved with land-related matters, I think this paragraph by Silvia Federici put it quite accurately:
-Text originally displayed during Jan Van Eyck Open studios
+“Can we think of gardens as more than a food source and instead as center of sociality, knowledge production, and cultural exchange?”<ref>1</ref>
-written by Nickie Sigurdsson
+In addition: Can we think of gardens as a portal into understanding important histories? Can the think of gardens as sites of experimental ecological thought, sites of learning with our environment? And thus, can we then think of gardens as places of resistance, as places of commoning?
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 File:Seedlings.jpg|
 </gallery>
+==References==
+{{reflist}}