Log book by Kaya Erdinc

Margaret Tait (1918-1999)

Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582)

Hannah Höch (1889-1978)

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

Cecilia Vicuña (1948-)

Care webs and the creole garden in Manthia Diawara’s Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26438941.2021.2003555

Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (Manthia Diawara, 2010): https://vimeo.com/ondemand/glissant/558002942

Flowers (Not) Worthy of Paradise: https://izk.tugraz.at/semesters/flowers-not-worthy-of-paradise/ (I emailed the professor of the class with a request to access the extended syllabus)

“Look within the creole garden, you put all species on this tiny lick of land: avocados, lemons, yams, sugarcanes… plus thirty or forty other species on this bit of land that doesn’t go more than fifty feet up on the side of the hill, they protect each other. In the big circle, everything is put into everything. He who finds the strength to mix has the strength to find.”

Edouard Glissant cited in LOICHOT, V: Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007, p. 149.

Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.36019/9781978818156/html

Gardening in Displacement: The Benefits of Cultivating in Crisis: https://academic.oup.com/jrs/article/32/3/351/5055879?login=false

Sound in Florescence: Cecil Taylor’s Floating Garden by Fred Moten: https://www.ubu.com/papers/moten.html

Nico Vela Page: https://nicovela.page/about (a very interesting artist, whose book of poems written in Spanglish (!) I'd love to read, and who seems to gather a lot of our questions about questions of queer migration, the archive as well as the transient garden: https://wendyssubway.com/publishing/titles/americon)

Cecilia Vicuña - Decolonizing myself: https://vimeo.com/278096899 (on the flower garden in which she grew up, which she discusses at the beginning)

Now I am Yours (Nina Danino, 1992) - flower as a chain? https://vimeo.com/433783463

Roundhay Garden Scene (Louis le Prince, 1888)

A Narrative Prepare for Saints (Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson, 1927-1928) https://www.ubu.com/sound/stein_saints.html

''Enclosed garden'' sculptures made by 13th century beguines, in Mechelen, Flanders (written about extensively by Kristeva and Irigaray for a 1994 catalog on a big survey of the works): https://jhna.org/articles/sensory-piety-social-intervention-mechelen-besloten-hofje/

Herbaria (Leandro Listorti, 2022): https://www.viennale.at/en/film/herbaria

The Meaning of Meaningless Words and the Coefficient of Weirdness by Bronislaw Malinowski (from: Coral Gardens and Their Magic, volume 2, "The Language of Magic and Gardening", pages 213-222): https://www.ubu.com/ethno/discourses/malin.html --- Coral Gardens and Their Magic, volume 1: https://archive.org/details/coralgardensthei0001mali/page/n9/mode/2up and volume 2: https://archive.org/details/coralgardensandt031834mbp/page/n3/mode/2up

The Hermit in the Garden: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16154857-the-hermit-in-the-garden <- I've spoken to a few people about this book, which is a mess, full of assumptions by a historian who projects on these stories and anecdotes retrospectively, with weak arguments and simplifications about what it means to be a hermit, portraying them as objects, whereas certain figures he evokes, like Rousseau, lived and maintained certain country houses out of urgent necessity. Nonetheless, the lack of care and inadequacy of this book makes for interesting pulp. As someone wrote: ''A more apt title for this book would be "The Hermitage in the Garden". The garden hermits themselves seem to have been rather rare and are in any case poorly documented. Most of the book is instead taken up by an unsystematic, heavily descriptive and rather repetitive study of a certain type of Georgian garden folly.'' However... I do think this is an interesting premise to explore further ! 

The horror garden does not appeal to me directly, but I'm intrigued in conceptions of the garden as something else than solely holistic or pleasant. When it points away from purity, but also not in the direction of Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose manifestation of different gardens is not mysterious enough and too violent for me, full of academic references and hierarchies that keep the world at bay. Little Sparta for me still maintains and preserves many traces from the garden of eden/lost paradise/enclosed garden tradition which made Glissant and Kincaid so rightfully suspicious.

Gosie Vervloessem's The Horror Garden: https://www.workspacebrussels.be/nl/projects/the-horror-garden

In the entire list of movies (https://www.imdb.com/find/?q=garden&ref_=nv_sr_sm) that carry the word ''garden'', there are very few that literally or directly interact with gardens or the habits and tools used in it. What kinds of projections or sentiments underlie this, and why is there a discrepancy between the allure of the metaphor and the slow/boring reality? And why are cult/horror movies more open to the latter? Is it because cult movies are less afraid to engage with platitudes?

Philippe Grandrieux's L'arrière saison (2007): https://www.are.na/block/16944426

The Gardener (1974): https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2zw7qf

''Carl the Gardner (Joe Dallesandro), grows odd plants for a rich Yankee woman Ellen Bennett (Katharine Houghton) living in South America while exercising a mental hold over her. All his previous employers died mysteriously. Some of his plants emit deadly fumes.'' (+ somehow the plot keywords listed on the IMDb page are both shocking and hilarious: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072133/keywords?ref_=tt_stry_kw)

Le jardin qui bascule (1975, with Delphine Seyrig): https://archive.org/details/jardin-qui-bascule-75

Jodie Mack: ''I teach, therefore I garden. I garden, therefore I teach!'' https://filmmakermagazine.com/114034-teacher-experimental-animator-jodie-mack/#.YljVw6QpAlQ

<3 <3 <3 

The Garden of Allah: In the pre-war era, there were multiple movies made through this lens, the famous one being the one in which Marlene Dietrich ''plays a cloistered woman who falls in love with a renegade monk.'' A vehicle for orientalist projections by Hollywood, remade (a fantasy literally reprojected to audiences) several times.

The Garden of Allah - Old Hollywood's Hedonistic Home: https://cinemascholars.com/the-garden-of-allah-old-hollywoods-hedonistic-home/

The garden that doesn't exist (Rä di Martino, 2022): https://thegardenthatdoesntexist.com/ A very intriguing speculative film about historical and cultural influence of a book (and its ramifications) on culture, reconsidering and tracing back the garden metaphor of one particular source. I haven't seen it, but it sounds like an ideal case study.

The Garden of Stones (Parviz Kimiavi, 1976, who interestingly also made a TV film on Simone Weil): https://archive.org/details/BaghSangui-TheGardenOfStones1976, full film is downloadable here: https://nitroflare.com/view/6D909AEF38767FA/Garden_of_Stones_%281976%29_--_Parviz_Kimiavi.mkv/free

Land Makar, poet of the land, after the Margaret Tait film of the same name (https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/3700)

I think Tait and Mary Graham Sinclair could be interesting figures to write about and include as possible members?

''To practice theory as a mode of habitation is to mix and mingle, in one's thinking, with the textures of the world. This means, if you will, not taking literal truths metaphorically, but taking metaphorical truths literally. The theorist can be a poet. For example, inspired by the poetry of Seamus Heaney, I might compare my digging for words to the crofter's digging for pear, and my pen to a spade. I would be urged on by an intuition that a deeper truth lurks within the comparison, and in my theorizing, that's the truth I'm trying to find. And I know that I'll have a greater chance of finding it by going to the ground than by lifting off. I should pick up a spade and dig!'' (Correspondences, chptr. Invitation: The way of art), p.15, 2021, Tim Ingold) 

''In the land as on parchment[/palimpsest]/, the past is not buried under the present but actually closest to the surface, while the present, undercutting the past, digs deepest. The past rises, even as the present descends. This is not a layering so much as a turning over.'' (Correspondences, chptr. Going to Ground, p.89, 2021, Tim Ingold)

''What does all this mean for the way we think about memory? Our modern sensibilities are profoundly conditioned by the idea that everything is formed of layers -- that the ground, trees, buildings books and even human beings are built up, layer upon layer,m with each layer already marked up with its own notations, whether numerical, graphic or diagrammatic. The past, then, is visible only by way of the translucence of the present. But the logic of the palimpsest teaches us otherwise. It tells us that with the passage of time, layers are not added but worn away, and that to mark them means cutting deep. As in the palimpsest, our oldest memories are not the deepest, nor are the most recent the shallowest. On the contrary, what is furthers in the past is closest to the surface. In our minds as well as in the ground we tread, our recent deeds and words are most profoundly seared, while traces of the distant past are so shallow as to be on the point of disappearing altogether, erased by the wind of present suffering. Like old paths grown so faint as to be no longer recognizable, memories only truly fade as they rise to the surface; prior forgetfulness is mere inadvertence.'' (Correspondences, chptr. Going to Ground, p.92, 2021, Tim Ingold)

While thinking of The Companions, as well as Ariana Reines' Invisible College , I have been wondering about the contemporary form of a truly secret and invisible community. What does it take today to remain and stay truly secret? And in its most literal way: that hearing about it via a public platform already undoes its degree of opacity? And joins in with the mechanics of the transparency society that Byung-Chul Han has described so well? And if the alternative is now struggling to (not-)emerge -- perhaps due to the current state of the internet -- then what alternatives are there? My feeling is that both the Companions as well as Invisible College are wondering aloud and collectively where these new iterations of the non-oppressive secret may find a safe place to grow? I think of the Scorpio's in online meme-culture that are ridiculised and scandalised constantly because of the fierce interiority that they project back into the world, which I feel many people struggle with (Margaret Tait was one, haha <3). It's also for good reason, I think, that people have taken decades to oppose and block out these questions, but the recent maximalisation of transparency (which profits from all these years of fears of forming secret/sacred contexts) everywhere is making people in our networks think twice. Until things really change in a different direction, which undoubtedly will bring its own dangers, I think places of neglect and of undervalued experiences (that wait to be ''transvaluated'' to speak with Kristeva) as containers of a kind of public secrets, hidden in plain sight. I wonder what you think! Addition on 12/02/2023: Reines writing: ''Saying goodbye to Invisible College. A semi-secret art concern...'' Provokes a lot of questions with me. Firstly that I feel it is less than semi-secret... And I love her as a contradictory/pompously honest scorpio, but I feel it is too widely known and promoted to label it in this way, and simultaneously: she is right about it being close to something that feels secret, whereas now I know how its publicness was used as a currency in art context. So how to deal with that if one decides to be semi-secret in the way IC was?

Former Yugoslavia:

One thing I'm thinking of is to consider amateur film archives, when spending time with Petra Belc, with who I organised the screening of films at Kunsthal Gent, I thought a lot about the frailness of the material, as well as the lacking ''artistic merit.'' that has often been attributed to it by major funding bodies, even more so in former Yugoslavia where all preservation depended on the people that were loyal to these film clubs. She has recently published this text: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/experimental-cinemas-in-statesocialist-eastern-europe/home-movies-and-cinematic-memories-fixing-the-gaze-on-vukica-dilas-and-tatjana-ivancic/AEF1EDC6211D3CB60FAA3F90BA1D5D9C

This would require more work of course, but I am sure there are plenty of great -- and often neglected -- amateur film archives through Europe that contain women filmmakers who engaged or challenged our notions of the garden. This may also be a more visually interesting method, and it also sidesteps parts of the language barriers that written archives create and perpetuate (with good and bad effects: I'm personally a supporter of this kind of closure and lack of access). In this the distinction between official/unoffical archives is interesting: I have intimately followed the debates and quarrels between Petra and the Croatian Film Archive, which has tried to confiscate all the archives and them lock them in their vaults, not wanting to open it up to anyone, except for those who pay. So what would this mean for us?

A great collection of texts, coming from a recent generation of artists and filmmakers from the Balkans, reappreciating the anti-film/amateur film tradition in their region: https://transimage.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/amateri-za-film-web.pdf


Poland:   

Online amateur film archive https://entuzjasci.artmuseum.pl/en/


Hungary: 

The Béla Balázs Archive, largely archived and conducted by a friend of mine, was supposed to be fully online and accessible to everyone, everywhere, but due to the political turmoil that Sebi experienced, he had to take it down and shield it for the sake of the archive's future. What does this mean? Especially for the women's histories that are once again buried under Orbán's dictatorial regime? https://monoskop.org/Bal%C3%A1zs_B%C3%A9la_Studio Does this mean that in times of political uproar and crisis, archives are the first to close and vanish? Especially if its state-owned?


Scotland:

My close contact with Sarah Neely might be of interest here. The Scottish Moving Image Archive has a lot of interesting work online, and in Edinburgh there is currently this exhibition devoted to women filmmakers and photographers in Scotland: https://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/glean-early-20th-century-women-filmmakers-and-photographers-scotland

I think it is very fascinating that, in the eyes of the Scottish Moving Image Archive, Margaret Tait is still valued as somewhat worthless (which Sarah thinks is both great as well as horrible for the sake of preserving Tait's heritage), since in the culture of film archiving, cinematic works of ''value'' are generally not freely viewable, whereas in Tait's case, almost her entire oeuvre can be viewed all over the world, whereas her only feature film needs to be rented or bought via BFI Player. On what basis is this distinction made? And who determines that this is a legitimate treatment of Tait, who of course always worked on the edge of amateurism? There is a lot of thoughts about her archive when I visited it. Here you can see the work: https://movingimage.nls.uk/search?personality=10032

I am also intrigued in counteracting Luke Fowler's treatment of her archive, which in times has been quite predatory (I assisted him for a while in this process) and can now be seen in his new film on Tait: https://bfmaf.org/programme/being-in-a-place-a-portrait-of-margaret-tait/. He very freely saw and exposed her teenage diaries to the light, which I still remember as a very violent and shocking intrusion, especially with her sense of privacy in mind. For me it does not matter that he did not include these segments into his final piece, the right to access that he claimed is questionable enough. What does it then mean to *not access* an archive? And still circle or move around its context? Why is there this urgent need to ''get ones hands'' on the materiality? Here is a a wonderful text by archival theorist Paolo Chercei Usai, long-time director of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, who has not acted up to his words: https://archive.org/details/deathofcinemahis0000cher

Amateur Cinema Project:  

https://www.amateurcinema.org/index.php/clubs (far from complete, but it for example shows a glimpse of amateur film archive culture in Italy, where almost every village is known to have preserved its own films)

“Queering the archive: amateur films and LGBT-memory.”: https://www.academia.edu/41337240/_Queering_the_archive_amateur_films_and_LGBT_memory_

I have also found out about this, the genre of the stag film, which I found horrible, except for this passage: ''Film historians describe stag films as a primitive form of cinema because they were produced by anonymous and amateur male artists who generally failed in achieving narrative coherence and continuity.'' I am wondering about how a queer and feminist anti-stag film would look like? Reclaiming the lack of narrative coherence and continuity? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_film <- is there a way that the right archive could be the setting for a kind of performance piece? That talk about what it means to ''engage'' with material and memory, but not necessarily access it? To think of the pornographic aspect of the film archive and the obsession to always categorise/conserve/touch it?

The Woman Behind the Camera: https://womanbehindthecamera.org/

“Terras (2010) uses these framings of amateurs’ labor in her discussion of amateur digital archivists, suggesting that amateur archivists execute digital cultural memory projects that are different from professional preservationist work but comparable to it, and that deserve consideration as serious, rather than ridiculous or random or trivial, enterprises.”

Excerpt From: Abigail De Kosnik. “Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom.” iBooks. <- how can we speculate about and through these archives, and might it be interesting for the film to use these works as material for a piece of imaginary fan fiction? Subverting and turning on its head the ''banality'' and ''uninteresting'' aspects that people have projected on home movies? I feel there has been too much serious work about amateur film archives, whereas it could be an opening to something much more free, while remaining respectful and loving towards its subjects.

"Community groups should also be empowered to develop their own archives.  As Jamie Haftargues, lines should not be drawn between “community-based” and “academic,” or “amateur” and “professional.” Rather, archives – as a practice and as construct – can be understood on a continuum of practice between the producers of the content and the preservers." (from: https://www.americansforthearts.org/blog-feed/where-is-the-archivist-in-community-archiving)

The next step might be to get in touch with the archivists, and start a dialogue about their collections related to our questions?

https://www.amsterdamhermetica.nl/online-resources/archives-libraries-online/


ESOGEN (Esotericism, Gender and Sexuality Network): https://esogennetwork.wixsite.com/home

       

https://ihlia.nl/

Queer Undergrowth: Weeds and Sexuality in the Architecture of the Garden: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1080/20507828.2017.1365541


Growing intimate privatepublics: everyday utopia in the naturecultures of a young lesbian and bisexual women’s allotment: https://cris.brighton.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/333420/Growing+Intimate+Privatepublics+%282014%29.pdf


Hos in the garden: Staging and resisting neoliberal creativity: https://sci-hub.se/10.1177/0263775816654915


Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10624269-sister-arts


Publications of Maize, hosted by the Lesbian Poetry Archive, but which isn't physical: https://www.lesbianpoetryarchive.org/Maize

Walworth Garden (1988): http://www.matrixfeministarchitecturearchive.co.uk/walworth/ (via a very cool working pad: https://etherpad.enter.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/p/Feminist_Design_Strategies)

Two crofters working in the Cairngorms: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/12/nature-is-interconnected-and-collaborative-and-our-business-is-too


Queer zine archives in the UK and Ireland: https://uizl.wordpress.com/uk-and-ireland-zine-libraries-directory/


April 2023 update:

U.K. archives that hold materials by queer or female or indigenous / global majority gardeners? Guide: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/gay-lesbian-history/

Kate Thomas, “Lesbian Arcadia: Desire and Design in the Fin-de-Siècle Garden.”: https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/kate-thomas-lesbian-arcadia-desire-and-design-in-the-fin-de-siecle-garden/?mc_cid=2a755e377b 
https://www.brynmawr.edu/sites/default/files/directory/cv/kthomas.pdf

Black British Gardeners: https://gal-dem.com/the-history-of-black-british-gardeners-is-one-of-resistance/

The Flower Garden (Matthias Darly, 1777): https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O694060/the-flower-garden-print-darly-matthias/ <- viewable on request

Engraving of a woman in profile, with a towering mass of hair surmounted by a flower garden with a temple to Mercury with a gardener raking the gravel paths.

Signed with monogram. Lettered with title and 'Pub by MDarly May 1:1777. where may be had bath Caricatures'. Numbered '15 V.2'.

Garden door (Katsura) (Birgit Skiöld, c. 1976): https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1239998/garden-door---katsura-print-birgit-ski%C3%B6ld/
   
Zen Garden III (Birgit Skiöld, c. 1973) : https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1239993/zen-garden-iii-print-birgit-ski%C3%B6ld/

A Garden Enclosed (wood engraving, by Eric Gill, 1925): https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O592699/a-garden-enclosed-wood-engraving-gill-eric/

Another Person's Garden III (Shelagh Wakely, 1976): https://collections.vam.ac.uk/search/?q=Wakely%2c%20Shelagh <- series of 8 (more here: https://www.richardsaltoun.com/viewing-room/5/)

Dress fabric design by Mabel Lucie Atwell (1931): https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O267184/dress-fabric-attwell-mabel-lucie/

Drawing of a populated ship inside a garden (c. 1820, artist unknown): https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O433571/drawing-unknown/

Embroidered picture of a vertical garden / garden-as-pedestal (Elizabeth Haines, 1920): https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O359861/embroidered-picture-haines-elizabeth/