ISSUE 67 — SUMMER 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 relationships 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 issue of Antennae, the one the proceeded it, and the one that will follow, are dedicated to gardening as creative process. We need to take gardens very seriously as legitimate artistic sites and media: organic tissues generated by resilient and dedicate nurturing capable of uprooting our disciplinary and institutional certainties to show us how we can reimagine art from scratch.

My gratitude goes to all the contributors to this issue, to Antennae’s academic board for its ceaseless support and expertise and to everyone else who has made this exploration possible.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi
Editor in Chief

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in this issue

Maria Thereza Alves

Christian Jil R. Benitez

Kay Chubbuck

Julianne Clark

Eric Dever

Deama Khader

Keiko Lee-Hem

David Rimanelli

Pamela Martínez Rod

Maggie Shirley

Felicity Talman

Mauricio Tolosa

Julia Lines Wilson

Gardening in the Anthropocene:
A queer perspective
on landscape

and loss

text: Julianne Clark

Julianne Clark explores her personal and artistic connection to the natural world, inspired by her botanist great-grandmother, who was also an avid gardener. Through her photography,
she investigates the interplay
between memory, landscape, and
family history.

p 12

in conversation: Keiko Lee-Hem and

Maggie Shirley

Disturbing colonialism: art, gardens

and relationships

This text brings together artist,
graphic designer, and gardener
Keiko Lee-Hem with artist and
community-development worker
Maggie Shirley in a conversation
that explores how Lee-Hem has
reimagined her garden as a site for
artistic creation and community
engagement.

p 22

Cultivating lost gardens

text and images: Deama Khader

Amid displacement, ecological
destruction, and cultural erasure,
Palestinian artists turn to the
land—its symbols, materials,
and memory—as a source of
resistance and rootedness. This
essay traces how traditional
practices like tatreez, alongside
contemporary visual art, forge
cultural continuity across borders
and generations.

p 38

Demons
in the garden

text: Christian Jil R. Benitez

The garden is proposed as a site of multiplicity—an always-entangled space that resists singular readings. A pivotal moment in José Rizal’s Noli Me Tángere (1887), in which a botanical garden provokes “the demon of comparisons”, serves as a starting point to explore how the garden inherently invites relational thinking.

p 51

Felicity Talman: Artistic practice as gardening

text and images: Felicity Talman

Future Drifts is a speculative garden in northeastern Québec: a case study in intra-ecosystem collaboration and negotiation. Conceived within a framework of "visible mending," the garden offers a space where hybrid aster species emerge, gesturing toward possible futures and acknowledging the irreversible ecological transformations inscribed on the land.

p 62

Future drifts

text and images: Julia Lines Wilson

p 70

Eric Dever: To see through the garden

Rooted in personal experience
and ecological observation, this
reflection traces the evolving
relationship between painting and
gardening in the artist’s practice.
From an initial focus on formal
garden structures to an embrace of rewilding and “purposeful neglect”, the artist’s studio garden becomes a living collaborator, shaping both subject matter and palette.

in conversation: Eric Dever and

Giovanni Aloi

p 86

Co-creative practices of a biomestizo

text and images: Mauricio Tolosa

The journey began with an invitation from a Japanese crabapple, Malus floribunda. Drawn to his unseen beauty, the author embarked on a five-year exploration of daily co-creative practices guided by admiration, grace, and gratitude. This path expanded to other species and
forests, revealing how plants and
humans can co-create a shared world.

p 103

Restoring the Cascade Garden of Roberto Burle Marx

text: Kay Chubbuck

Commissioned in 1989, the Cascade Garden at Longwood Gardens is the only surviving design in North America by renown landscape architect and conservationist Roberto Burle Marx. This photo essay explores the move of the Cascade Garden to its new home.

p 117

The normal garden

text and images: Pamela Martínez Rod

The Normal Garden is a series of
hybrid images that offers a visual
meditation on the abandoned
Quinta Normal Garden, located in
the heart of Santiago de Chile.
Originally conceived according
to European models, the garden
once stood as a symbol of colonial
ambition—an attempt to impose
agricultural systems and cultivate
exotic flora in foreign soil.

p 134

Theater and Agon in Patricia Coates's A Variant of Concern

David Rimanelli, describes
his initial experience of Patricia
Coates’s artwork and situates it art
historically, with references to Hans Haacke, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Joseph Beuys, and Martha Rosler; artists with explicit socio-political and/ or environmental bases.

text: David Rimanelli

p 145

Maria Thereza Alves:
Seeds of Change

in conversation: Maria Thereza Alves
and Giovanni Aloi

Artist Maria Thereza Alves reflects on how gardens became central
to her practice, beginning with Seeds of Change. She discusses the socio-political and ecological dimensions of working with plants, emphasizing community knowledge, colonial histories, and the ethics of care.

p 161

"Gardening is never instant, the life cycle of plants is continuous, usually developing over long periods of time. The gardener must be patient, waiting months for the seeds or bulbs they planted to bloom, and is acutely aware of death."

Felicity Talman p 66

"My hope is that growing a plant with “baggage” in the horticultural setting of
a formal garden might continue conversations around what plants belong where."

Julia Lines Wilson p 84

"Just like a painting might sustain my interest and keep me working on it for months, it’s the same with particular plants. They keep me rooted in the garden, tending and caring for everything else around them."

Eric Dever p 96

"Over the years, people interviewing me have often asked what the plants
are. And while I understand the curiosity, that’s never been the point for me. It’s
not about proving something through the plants. Just the fact that they sprout:
that there’s life in the soil, even when it’s been buried under asphalt; that’s what
moves me."

Maria Thereza Alves p 171