The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions

Collaboration with Naomi Woo, and other international artists, writers, and musicians (2020–ongoing)

The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions transplants, reroots, and propagates a queer, feminist gardening society founded by 12th century mystic and musician Hildegard von Bingen. It brings together an international group of artists, gardeners, archivists, researchers, as well as members of the public to investigate how collaboration and public art allow us to share knowledge, build community, reflect on hidden and neglected voices in queer history and beyond. The project is committed to intersectional, anti-racist, queer research into botany, environmental issues, and forgotten or lost feminist archives.

Members of the society recently collaborated on A Garden Variety, a collection of scores for care; and in August 2021, the society presented a queer documentary-style talk-show opera at the Cockpit as part of Tete a Tete Opera Festival. This live performance was then transformed into a film and became the subject of a solo exhibition in 2023. Since the beginning, we have been building our archives, through The Garden Shed.

We regularly hold meetings or 'gatherings', as well as workshops, which range from the hands-on practical to the conceptual. Our films, performances, publications, and community events have served as powerful mediums to ask questions about environmental stewardship and queer community.

We have worked with many partner organisations, such as the Growing Project at Grand Union Gallery, Birmingham, Nottingham Contemporary, Ruta del Castor (Mexico City), the Art Research Garden and Goldsmiths Allotment; Tête à Tête. We have presented our research at Harvard University; the Performance Philosophy conference; and in peer-reviewed publications such as Performance Research and elsewhere.

The Society also publishes an irregular newsletter, titled The Minutes of the Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, which shares recent works, practices, artistic research, and gardening and farming related knowledge and ideas. It is framed as an irregular almanac, a shared creative space in print-form that connects people across time, space, and practices. It features poetry, artwork, conversation, performance documentation, research, process notes, and rituals, and thinks about stretchy time, forms of embodiment, the scale of intimacy, the environment beyond the ‘natural’, and gardening as teaching, teaching as gardening.