https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/chronograms/6783050/liberation-gardens
Door: Wolff Architects
“Liberation Gardens is an ongoing research project that studies liberation as a spatial practice. Developed through fieldwork, archival research, drawing, and collage, the project traces how gardens, domestic landscapes, cultivated terrains, and acts of tending have historically functioned as spaces of emancipatory imagination across the global majority and its diasporas. The project builds upon architect and theorist Mario Gooden’s proposition that “liberation is a spatial practice,” an ongoing process involving acts of occupation, refusal, and collective worldmaking, rather than discrete ideological or political end goals. It therefore asks what kinds of spatialities emerge under conditions of violence, dispossession, colonialism, apartheid, and extraction, and how oppressed peoples have historically produced spaces of autonomy within and against those structures.
The chronogram develops through the figure of the garden. Not as an ornament, but a site of survival, relation, fugitivity, and cultural production. The project draws particularly from Édouard Glissant’s notion of the “creole garden”: The rhizomatic spaces cultivated by enslaved peoples within and against the plantation system in the Caribbean and the larger Black Atlantic. The Creole garden functioned simultaneously as a space for sustenance, healing, spirituality, cultural invention, and dialogue. Resisting the rigid monoculture of the plantation, it embodied multiplicity, opacity, and interdependence. “
