ISSUE 66 — SPRING 2025

Gardens are autobiographical spaces, relentlessly co-authored by constantly evolving communities of gardeners, some equipped with spades, others with claws and some more endowed with long roots. In collaboration with the soil, this process of coauthoring results in open ended narratives that emerge and dissolve, leaving behind traces of minerals and decomposing matter.

Gardens are endless processes of resistance, resilience, and regeneration; Sedimentations of past and present participations that always edge into a mostly unpredictable future of germination, dissemination, and attraction.

But first and foremost, gardens are chapters of multispecies-desire. In a garden, acts of control—pruning, planting, fencing—intertwine with gestures of surrender to decay, chance, and change. Gardens are simultaneously curated and wild, political and ecological, personal and collective. Once displays of aristocratic power, gardens have evolved alongside our shifting relationship with nature.

It might not be inappropriate to state that today, gardens in contemporary art have become more than a new genre—their unstoppable and over evolving fluidity a challenge to the austerity and fetishization of purity and timelessness that has characterized our western museums for many centuries

This current issue of Antennae, and the two that will follow, are dedicated to gardening as a creative process. Gardens are the new open-sky museums: outdoors, accessible, generous, and always a diverse multitude at once. They might just cradle new forms of art that our future truly needs.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi
Editor in Chief

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in this issue

Nura Mohammedata Beshir Sylvia Grace Borda

Rosie Carr

Patrick Costello

Elisabeth Dzuricsko

Elysia French

Clare Fuery-Jones

Maggie Groat

Tyler Kirkholm

Julian Lucas

Keepa Maskey

Jessica Mueller

Dao Nguyen

Anna Reckin

Kris Schaedig

Areeya Tivasuradej

Lynn Turner

Coils, twines, notwithstanding

text: Anna Reckin

This short lyric essay, based on
an ongoing engagement with one
particular species, is a partial set
of explorations in these directions.
The plant under examination here
is a creeper, Lathyrus latifolius, the
everlasting pea, investigated through notes and a speculative glossary.

p 10

Letting go

text: Areeya Tivasuradej

Join Areeya Tivasuradej and Achum
at the landfill-turned-garden,
Suanphak Khon Mueang Chiang
Mai, or the Chiang Mai Urban Farm, where trash was omni-present but now buried under vegetables. Occasionally, the litter resurfaced like the everyday fun stories and struggles that

p 20

The garden as
earth observation artwork

text and images: Nura Mohammedata Beshir and Sylvia Grace Borda

This article explores the design
and implementation of a Tree
Circle Garden at the National
Gullele Botanic Gardens in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia, with a focus on its
development as an innovative public space. Its use is uniquely diverse supporting mentorship of the next generation about Indigenous knowledge and plant species.

p 39

A muse and model for a way of being

text: Clare Fuery-Jones

In southern New South Wales,
Australian artist Imants Tillers
inhabits a home and garden
surrounded by bushland. The son
of Latvian refugees, Tillers works
through issues of displacement and self-finding identifying the garden as a context in which connections to past and present are possible.

p 46

A weed is a weed is a weed

text and images: Dao Nguyen

Communal dreams and immigrant
heirlooms conjure a garden of forking paths, less a story, and more so a frenzied catalog of time and material obsessions within an expanded practice. I dig through gardens real and re-membered to consider questions of belonging.

p 68

Temporal rhythms

text and images: Elysia French and Maggie Groat

A durational correspondence
with interdisciplinary artist Maggie
Groat serves as the basis for this
exploration of practices of care and labour, foregrounding the shared experiences—both visible and invisible—between humans and other-than-humans in cultivated spaces.

p 80

Baikuntha keba,
found garden

“Baikuntha Keba, Found Garden”,
series–2024 is a homage to my late father, Baikuntha who was an avid gardener, and to the others that departed at the time of COVID-19. The imagery illustrates a visual play of textile and experimental photography, leading towards a pondering on a radical new understanding of birth.

text and images: Keepa Maskey

p 96

To surrender: gardener and gardened

text and images: Elisabeth Dzuricsko, Tyler
text: Julian Lucas Kirkholm, Jessica Mueller, Kris Schaedig

Balancing the practice of cultivating gardens with the choice to surrender to natural ecosystems and rhythms invites complex questions. Chaos, neglect, overgrowth, and the methodically manicured all intersect within this tension. Personal encounters serve as entry points. When is the decision made to relinquish control?

p 104

Victory gardens: where did they go?

text: Julian Lucas

During World War II, “Victory
Gardens” became a widespread
movement in the United States, with nearly 20 million gardens producing 40% of the nation’s fresh vegetables. Building on the World War I garden movement, these gardens symbolized patriotism, unity, and resilience, as citizens responded to rationing and food shortages.

p 124

Common ground

text and images: Rosie Carr

Set within a women's refuge, this diaristic reflection considers whether community gardening might offer a form of embryonic re-commoning—not only through the sharing of land, labour, and food, but also as a means of softening the psychological enclosures imposed by neoliberal conditions. The writer's pregnant body becomes a site from which to observe acts of earthly collaboration and seasonal change.

p 134

Memory is a strange palette

Urban gardens provide spaces
for building relationships across
boundaries of age and experience.
This essay focuses on an
intergenerational queer friendship
formed in a garden at a Supportive
Housing building located in the
Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

text and images: Patrick Costello

p 151

Saying ceanothus:
the indefinite garden

text and images: Lynn Turner

This experimental text mediates
the work of mourning and
the practice of gardening as a
space of play. Both ‘work’ and
‘play’ are transplanted across
various contexts, theoretical and
geographical. It draws upon
the vegetal tongue of decon-
struction as the common language
at the verdurous heart of the lives
on which it reflects.

p 166

"In the Australian context (and other European-colonised nations around the
world) the very presence of (Western-style) gardens, their making and maintenance,
is held in tension with the history that has made them possible."

Clare Fuery-Jones p 48

"Theft of tomatoes beckoning to be picked in their ripeness, whether by human or squirrel hands, is not uncommon at community gardens across Chicago, but this uprooting and loss of life that I had nurtured from seed felt violent."

Dao Nguyen p 69

"Western thinking and consumerism in service to capitalism must be un-
tangled from how we define success. What determines if you've been a good houseplant keeper or gardener or housewife—a TradWife (traditional wife)– pristinely manicured, without flaws? Are they perfect? Versus true surrender in

connection to something bigger, something potentially messy."

Jessica Mueller p 105

"Gardening is a uniting force, especially in the city. There is a medley of enemies to rally against. You have the usual antagonists: weeds, squirrels, weather, too many tomatoes. Then there are more specific ones: developers, elected of-
ficials, the building super, the homophobic neighbor who uses cardboard boxes
and moldy comforters to build dwellings for feral cats in the flower beds. Also,
rats. Always rats."

Patrick Costello p 155