I AM THE EARTH AND THE EARTH IS ME
community gardens are radical spaces
Hello Fellow Beings,
Today, I am culminating a year as a More Art Engaging Artists Fellow. What I want to say to you at this moment is that this time last year I was in the throes of deep despair and this year I am so grateful to not be there and where I am. Part of my recovery has been the experience of developing my social practice and engaging in community with both my fellow Fellows and at 462 Halsey of which I initially reached out as a community partner for my project I AM THE EARTH AND THE EARTH IS ME and of which I became a member and grew friendships through the process.
Today, I am sharing a performance - lecture - lecture - performance as a final presentation of this phase of my project. I’ll be talking about how community gardens are inherently radical spaces and how they propel us to look inward and then look outward. I’ll include an introduction to the thesis of the project and how understanding my relationship to land is helping me to understand the context of global suffering, in particular the conflict in Israel and Gaza, which presently, feels like the most urgent outcome from this phase of I AM THE EARTH AND THE EARTH IS ME…
It feels special that you might be reading this at the very moment that I am performing it in front of my friends, colleagues and strangers.
If you see me in the near future, please be tender with me! I’m just an artist sharing her work and expending the energy to put it in front of people. Okay - onward.
xo Jessica
Like so many, I spent 2020 questioning my place within the systems that govern our lives. Quickly, quickly, we realized that the absence of care within our government structures would require a reorganization of our views.
In this time of acute lockdown, I mostly sat on my fire escape, looking down, staring at the community garden beneath my window and contemplating -
- thinking about my body, my hurt, how this body of hurt was and is intricately woven with the bodies of others.
- thinking about the space between small and large, our micro hurts compounding into global hurt1.
I doom-scrolled the Stuyvesant Heights Next Door trolling for a neighbor with backyard compost and free seedlings. I grow these seedlings on my fire escape garden, tilling my questions into the roots of cherry tomatoes and surrendering my uncertainty to the Earth.
With each bow, dropping my forehead to the ground, a surrender.
The Earth alchemizing the tenderness, tears, gasps of breath, longing enduring, questioning, questioning.
With each bow, with the continual act of bowing and surrendering, I found that this land more than holds past, present and future.
—
The grounding question of my project I AM THE EARTH AND THE EARTH IS ME, is “How can we build a more reciprocal relationship with the land we live on?” Alternatively, it is a call from Robin Wall Kimmerer:
“For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”2
I want to explore what it means to live like my children’s future depends on taking care of the land I live on, specifically, the land of my neighborhood Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Bed-Stuy is an Environmental Justice Area, a designation created by the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation to describe communities that meet at least two of the following criteria:
At least 51.1% of the population in an urban area reported themselves to be members of minority groups;
At least 33.8% of the population in a rural area reported themselves to be members of minority groups; or
At least 23.59% of the population in an urban or rural area had a household income below the federal poverty level.
Bed-Stuy not only meets the criteria for climate and environmental justice, but it has been one of the most redlined neighborhoods in New York City, historically leaving it without adequate tree-top coverage. This divestment leaves Bed-Stuy residents susceptible to both the physical and mental damage of climate change. Susceptibility, a recurring condition of the marginalized.
—
This project phase has engaged at the scale of a specific site in Bed-Stuy at 462 Halsey Street.
From form to emptiness, emptiness to form.
Sandwiched between two building blocks, 462 Halsey Community Farm was founded in 2012 by Shatia Jackson and Kristen Bonardi Rapp. It exists in a radical and political lineage of reclaiming private and public land for public use - initiated by Hattie Carthan, the Tree Lady of Brooklyn who first noticed that our neighborhood did not have enough trees and Liz Christy, founder of Green Guerrillas and one of the stewards of the first community garden in NYC, the Bowery Houston Community Farm and Garden.
Community gardens are fundamentally spaces for change. When tending to a garden plot, you start with the soil ensuring that it is rich with minerals and prepared to house the seedlings it will hold. You get in close, bowing the body forward to observe and track the progress of seedlings, to check the underbelly of leaves for pests, and to nurture and care for plants in the hope of fruitful harvests. At season's end, the plants go to seed, vines shrivel and return to the earth, and the land goes fallow to rest for the winter.
From emptiness to form, form to emptiness.
A garden asks us to slow down and take care of a specific place. Placemaking is a quiver of the heart, the something within ourselves that says “Ah, yes. Here! Pay attention to this!” In collective imagining, the energy is gathered around the care of space. The poetics of this space allow for the radical, political, and spiritual to arise.
—
We gathered at 462 Halsey on October 8 for contemplation, writing, poetry and photography.
About 25 of us explore how the land we inhabit holds and carries us, examine our connections to the environment, its refuge and beauty, and share our nature writings. While co-hosting this space, I am aware that we are in the quiver - in the space between stimulus and response - of the unfolding of the violence of October 7. The conflict in Israel and Gaza is something I previously gave myself a pass on understanding, deferring to the language of “too complex to understand”. In these days, I am confused and playing catch-up on a dialogue that I am uncertain where or even if I should place myself within. On that day at the garden, I write a poem about roots and seeds.
In the following weeks, there will be news that the IDF is raining warnings over the Gaza Strip. The leaflets read “For your safety, you should not return home until further notice from the IDF.” I have been caught up in the imagery of a Palestinian looking up and watching paper flutter across the sky, perhaps hours before being displaced from their land.
As for my own looking up from my garden perch, I am largely watching the planes travel into LaGuardia and JFK. I look up and count: Southwest, Delta, United, Jet Blue.
My understanding develops by returning to place and the praxis of black feminist scholars. In her essay “Homeplace (a site of resistance)” bell hooks3 asserts the role that black women have held in cultivating the home as a site of resistance. “Homeplace” is a site where we are unbound from presenting ourselves in any particular way. We are free to unravel, restore, rest and recover our wholeness. This place cultivates the conditions for resistance to oppression, racism, sexism, and displacement. Thus, any attack of the home is an attempt to not only leave one without a physical space but to inflict warfare on the neural pathways that hold the possibility for liberation.
If my urgency to take care of the land of Bed-Stuy allows me to look inward, my participation in communal care of 462 Halsey forces me to look outward. Presently, I am haunted by a familiar ghost that reminds me of the vast scale between my local hurt and the global hurt. From Bed-Stuy to Palestine, susceptibility, a recurring condition of the marginalized.
My urgency also reminds me of the slowness of things. 462 Halsey reminds me that where a building no longer stand, a garden may grow in its place.
The Palestinian-led community organization, Within Our Lifetime calls for people to Flood Brooklyn for Gaza and I decide to join the flood. Arriving at the Brooklyn Museum, I watch a police drone watching me. On the march route, I see Meagan and Abby and Nate, garden friends, our feet touching the Earth together, our attention collectively turned outward from 462 Halsey, acting out devotion to tend to the global hurt, momentarily. We march together, momentarily, before I lose them in the mass of bodies.
xo Jessica
For more context, today, I am presenting work with my cohort More Art Fellows. Event details are below.
Join us on Saturday, January 27th, 2024 for Rituals of Social Transformation, a showcase of the work of More Art’s 2023 Engaging Artists Fellows, featuring work and conversations by Carrie Sijia Wang, Danielle Cowan, Jessica Angima, Mei Ling Yu, Nava Derakhshani, and Ray Jordan Achan.
Rituals of Social Transformation invites participants to delve into the evolving practices, cultivated research findings, and transformative routines of More Art's newest cohort of Engaging Artist Fellows.
As we explore the alchemical power of building community, developing radical empathy, and stewarding our own communal and personal rituals of care, connection, and transformation, we get a peek at the journeys and processes our fellows have undertaken over the last year. This public presentation of ongoing work will illustrate the 2023 cohort’s exploration of and attention to themes of information accessibility, community care, storytelling, and visibility.
Work with me.
You can find me weekly at Heal Haus, five days a week at Arena and often at 462 Halsey Community Farm.
🌞
Fractals
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Maybe, possibly, if the spirit moves me, there will be a future slowly, slowly about this writing.
This line in particular is a direct hit for me: (Thank you. 🌺)
"Thus, any attack of the home is an attempt to not only leave one without a physical space but to inflict warfare on the neural pathways that hold the possibility for liberation."
Thank you