Tending to the Compost: Cultivating a Consciousness and Embodied Relationship with the Garden

"I only marveled at the way the garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own...and the past as it is indirectly related to me" – Jamaica Kincaid

This workshop considers the garden as a site of embodied transformation: a space that cultivates a consciousness of the world, its complexities and contradictions, its beauty and its violence. The garden is a site of paradox, where the histories of migration, labour, empire, ecologies, and cultural traditions become entangled with the soil, plants, and organisms that constitute it. 

September is a month marked by transition. Across many ESEA cultures and traditions, it is a time to welcome the historic abundance of the harvest and pay respects to our ancestors. In the garden, the beginning of the end of the growing season marks the slow senescence of productivity. It is a time of gratitude and reflection that brings us closer to cycles of change.

Participants will reflect on their personal memories through an offering to a collective altar–the “compost heap”. Sharing our cultural traditions, stories, rituals, and tastes, we will tend to these offerings: what we hold close, what we grieve, and what we allow to leave behind. Untethered to prescribed traditions of remembrance, we will honour our histories that have brought us here while creating space for new rituals that metabolise these memories into nourishment for the autumn garden.

As we tend to our hopes and desires for the coming seasons, we will learn and carry out practical autumnal garden tasks at the ESEA Community Centre garden, which may include seed sowing, saving seed, and fertilising beds. Through collective and seasonal care, we will explore gardening as an embodied practice that, rather than offering an escape from the world, pulls us deeper into a relationship with the world itself.

All materials provided.

About the artist: 

Yoni Carnice (he/him) is an interdisciplinary practitioner working across landscape architecture, gardening, education, and art. His practice foregrounds the garden as both a physical and metaphorical site through which to explore the entanglements of culture, ecology, and place.

As a designer, he creates gardens that are attuned to local ecologies and the people who tend them, fostering an evolving relationship between gardener and garden. His education practice centres on building embodied relationships with the planted world through food growing, habitat restoration, and other experimental forms of engagement. Alongside this, his artistic practice works through collage, writing, research, archival methods, and zine-making to make legible the work of often overlooked gardeners and their gardens.

Supported Tickets:

If you're experiencing financial hardship and even a Community Ticket isn't affordable, please email esea.offshoots@gmail.com. We have a limited number of supported tickets available and will do our best to help.