Monday, October 29th, 7:30pm.
PSU 5th Avenue Cinema
510 SW Hall St.
Free and open to the public, all ages
Fritz Haeg is an architect of human homes, animal homes, and gardens. I was introduced to his work this summer at the Tate Modern where his latest Edible Estates project, garden #4, was commissioned for the stunning Global Cities exhibition. In the midst of towering images of crowded slums in Shanghai, Cairo, and Mumbai, the pictures and instructions for a small edible garden were, like the gardens themselves, nearly lost in the hubbub.
Truthfully, it didn’t seem that interesting to me at first, community gardens being common enough to a Portlander. But behind the short wall of garden photos was a table of books on organic gardening and instructions for DIY edible gardens, and lo, the area was jammed with Londoners. It took me a moment to remember that Portland is indeed a bubble, and the rest of the world doesn’t have the greenery we enjoy. So it was Haeg who the Tate selected to bring an edible garden to an overlooked plot of dirt the middle of London.
Of the six commissioned pieces (more on Bus Shelter by Nils Norman in a later post), Haeg’s was the only one that led the viewer out of the Tate and into the city to a small edible community garden. Since London was one of the cities examined on density, diversity, and pollution in the Global Cities exhibition, stepping out of Turbine Hall was already thought provoking. According to the exhibition program, still in rotation in the Celilo office, “Bankside is one of London’s least green areas; the few open spaces it does provide remain heavily polluted by the effect of past industrialization.” Haeg’s garden makes use of a small, sad looking area at the base of apartment buildings, where “mounded beds separate the plants from the contaminated soil.” The exhibition ended in August, so hopefully tonight’s lecture will provide an update on the state of the garden.
The Edible Estates manifesto brings its mission home to this side of the pond, declaring “an attack on the American front lawn and everything it has come to represent.” It continues, “Edible Estates proposes the replacement of the American lawn with a highly productive domestic edible landscape. Food grown in our front yards will connect us to the seasons, the organic cycles of the earth and our neighbors. The banal lifeless space of uniform grass in front of the house will be replaced with the chaotic abundance of bio-diversity.” As an artist and architect of human homes and their surroundings, Haeg’s holistic view of living spaces will be a fresh addition to the Portland green scene.
And, based on his other work, tonight’s lecture will certainly be entertaining. Check out Haeg’s cheeky proposition for a 2012 Olympic ‘extreme summer event’ called
Olympic Farming, also presented at the Tate. Beginning, “Every night our London dinner plate becomes the venue for a sort of global Olympic event: representing China: SWEET POTATOES / traveling 5000 food miles; from Egypt: GRAPES / at 2200 miles; Ghana: PINEAPPLES / 3,100 miles…”
Edible Estates will be spreading to US cities, removing lawns across the US for several years. A parallel project called
Animal Estates aims to create dwellings to bring back animals displaced by “cities, strip malls, garages, office parks, freeways, front yards, parking lots and neighborhoods.” A prototype appears to be coming to Reed College’s
Cooley Gallery in October 2008.
Watch a video on the Edible Estates garden in London
here.
Edible estates are in Los Angeles, Salina, Kansas, Austin, and London. Email to info(at)edibleestates.org.
Portland State University MFA Monday Night Lecture Series is sponsored by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. View upcoming lectures on their
calendar.
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