Institutional ecosystems, ecosystemic institutions: life cycles, (non-)linear time, and stewardship

This seminar held at Goldsmiths and realised through a small RSA grant brought together, on the one hand, my PhD research, which has explored the lifespan of alternative educational and cultural spaces, and tactics to overcome their demise or morphing into mainstream institutions, and more broadly speaking, chrononormativity. On the other hand, it was informed by my ongoing horticultural and permaculture design training as well as my curatorial and pedagogical work, which has been increasingly placed at the service of ecosystems, thus subject to nature’s seasonal cycles.

The seminar focused on the concept of time – slow, anxious, ecological, institutional, queer – and on the practice of stewardship. It questioned where and how to look for a reconceptualization of waiting, slowness, and longevity, and how this reconceptualization may benefit cultural practice, the design of future institutions, or the redesign of existing ones.

“Institutional ecosystems, ecosystemic institutions: life cycles, (non-)linear time, and stewardship” notably aimed to tackle the implications, uses as well as misuses of the terms ‘care’, ‘legacy’ and ‘maintenance’, whether one is working on a garden, an allotment or a micro-forest, or developing a public, participatory art project, looking after an art collection (or a herbarium), or sowing the seeds of a collective, an organisation, an institution.

Held in the Art Research Garden and online, the seminar brought together food and art practitioner, and writer Barney Pau; writer and MA Art and Ecology programme leader Dr Ros Gray; biologist Dr Olivier Hamant; head of the Regenerative Economics programme, Schumacher College, Dartington Trust, Ruth Potts; curator and postgraduate researcher, University of Edinburgh, Quinn Garrison; curator Francesco Manacorda; and organiser and researcher Dr Benedetta d’Ettore.