40. Slowdown landscapes: Meadow
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Cities, Gardening, Design, Landscape, Art

And although Infield is deeply rooted in historical research, it is not looking backwards to some pre-Acceleration Arcadian vision. Kieran Long, ArkDes director, suggests that it is asking different questions of public spaces, as environments that could “work with nature instead of against it, making space for non-human species and sharing the city with them.” Indeed, Tegg notes that due to these intensive human-plant interactions, “Sweden’s remnant infields are among the most species rich plant communities in on Earth.”

Our challenge is to live well amongst such species-rich biodiversity, as one of these active species; not by placing nature ‘over there’, cultivated across agricultural infields or lying fallow in outfields, but in public space, in urban space, amidst the infield equivalents in our One Minute Cities. Creating gardens and meadows that are curated, cared for and owned by residents is a powerful act, particularly given that the current context of streets and spaces regulated and maintained by abstract others. Outside of activism, today’s streets offer little opportunity for meaningful participation. In fact, such shared gardens and meadows necessitate engagement. They require care. This creates a pull on people, which can only be fulfilled by reorganising the way we live, by flattening time and power relations, by slowing down.

In that flattening, we learn not only to live with nonhumans, but as humans too. Paraphrasing Richard Sennett, the point of cities is to learn to live well with people who are not like us. Now we know we must learn to live well with nonhumans too. Morton again makes clear how all these patterns are entwined when he says “we make a thin, rigid and untenable distinction between the human and the nonhuman. And the big reason for that is racism.”

Through the traditional lenses of disciplines and institutions, it unlikely that we immediately connect an art installation in a car park about a Swedish meadow to the Black Lives Matter protests on the streets. Yet this is the powerful idea in Morton’s thinking: that all of these false separations, and ‘over yonder’-ing, and othering, are forms of racism, essentially. They deny a basic truth about our relationships. With other ways of seeing, we can look to the decisions and actions we take about gardens, meadows, streets, and neighbourhoods as continuous interconnected tangled systems, the matter in which the otherwise intangible dark matter is played out. (The first of Büscher and Fletcher’s suggested ‘convivial conservation’ actions in The Conservation Revolution is “Historic Reparations”, both material and non-material.)

Given our tendency to move on from crises — in fact, often to move backwards — we must keep putting these issues onto the table, keep searching for new ways of seeing, keep looking for clues in the environment around us, and in that work that we make.

One of the joys of Olelekan Jeyifous’s drawings, for example, is that nature is not “clandestine”, just as infrastructure is not invisible. Culture, whether of the Caribbean or of code or of both, is to the fore too. The nonhuman, whether root systems or robots, is entangled with the humans and vice versa.

The insights from Tegg’s Infield include a sensation of something looser, more open, foregrounding the experiential, infrastructural and cultural at the same time. As an installation, and as a garden or meadow, it demonstrates a process, a way of acting, a set of behaviours, as well as attitudes to nature, time, production, public space, urbanism, ownership and collective decision-making. Despite its smallness — or perhaps because small is beautiful — it stands for the necessary everyday struggles and contests will we face in this shift of gears from acceleration to slowdown.

Meadows over lawns

I visited Infield many times, during project meetings for Street, and got to watch its progress unfold. In July, visiting with my children, we got talking to one of the ArkDes curators, who described the struggle that Infield itself had gone through. Initially, the production was derailed by corona, with Tegg coordinating the work from Australia and leaning on the Swedish crew 10,000 kilometres away. Then, when installed, a series of existential challenges, as if foregrounding the changing climate: first, an unusually late very cold period, with frost through to late-May. Then a week later, intense heat with 35C+ days on the tarmac through to late June. Then … the geese! Then huge amounts of rain during July; warmish rain, but gallons of it, in continuous downpours. Who knows what next. The curator was clearly quietly impressed by the meadow’s resilience, fond of how it was facing these challenges and still thriving. (If Tegg were around, perhaps she might invoke the Australian colloquialism ‘little battler’.)

The curator then did a wonderful small thing. We’d described how my son and I cut the grass on our lawn at home to deliberately leave a couple of small squares of un-cut meadow. Doing so was my son’s idea, actually, though after some gentle nudging from me (in fact, one of my favourite old Fabrica projects was Project Meadow, which is a story for another day.) Listening carefully to my son, the curator led my kids over to a clump of flowering grasses (Lotus corniculatus, often known as ‘Egg and Bacon’ in English) and kneeling down, she began to describe how they could also help pollinate, like a bee.

After feeling her way through a few of the grasses with her fingers, she carefully plucked a couple of seed pods and pressed them into my son’s hand, saying we could simply pop them into our small ‘meadows’ at home. She was quick to add she was an artist, not a botanist, and that it might not work — but it was worth a try “as an experiment.”