The Garden

 15.4.10


The garden environment I set up between 2001 and 2009 was an attempt to play out a simple program and to let unfold various actions, associations, wanderings without any direct goal of making it happen and so determining it in a closed format according to skill, capacity, intent or even wishes. Rather the point was to set up various limit factors and constraints that should have been repetitive and perhaps should even have magnified the autistic “tropes” so popular and familiar with both professionals and the general public concerning the triad of impairments associated with autism:- deficit in communication, social skills and imagination- and through essentially non-verbal practices of how things were put together in the making of a garden and in accumulative balance sculptures, to see how various gestures and timings allowed for an ongoing passing commentary through this placement of objects and bodies. Could a memory space emerge that did not reside in the minds of the participants but in the environment itself which brought forth through affect the composite actions and over and over again reinforced certain ways of being that we did not aim for but simply arrived at because they worked in that context.

These ways of being, tenderized people to one another in brief exchanges that played out and altered over time to become countless versions of each other. It was that capacity for split-second changes and adaptations that became a thinking model- the beginnings of an idea and hence in the terms set out, a languaging intimately connected to emotion; emotion as an active verb- hence, emotioning. That language emanated out of a constantly revisited and reinforced atmosphere that was known in the small differentials set up in contrasting kinds of pressure and release through which materials were felt, handed from one to another, angled and settled back down into various juxtapositions.

The sculptures became a site of a kind of learning, molded over time to become wind-resistant whilst also being open to change; animal inhabitation and child wreckage alike. These contingent elements became as it were, written into the sculptures; embalmed as their background code and within that frame autistic people were un-phased by change- something that is always highlighted as a major difficulty for them- indeed it is a major factor in their diagnosis. Yet they came to expect these differences that played out in positions of sculptures that built up and fell down and they played inventively off of these transformations in the stop-start of their own positioning. That came to be an articulation that was only possible in the gages held open between each others presence within the wider sphere of what came to be the environment of a garden.

The environment was made by the actions – actions not usually considered to be emotionally loaded- indeed actions classically associated with autistic aloneness. Yet these actions held the key to creating points of reinforced joint actions, departures from these repetitions, and gradual piece upon piece innovative change. The three triads of impairment: deficit in communication, in social skills and in imagination were addressed not by setting up closed tasks with positive reward- such as is found in Applied Behavioral models but by simply holding open a space of on-going activity according to the tendencies already in play and letting those actions affect one another and meld into new possibilities, through a process of contagion and affect. In that sense practices usually associated with isolation and mindless self-absorption within the psychological rule book, became the key to playing out conjoint pacing through which fractionally differentiated states interacted and over time the garden came to exist. People- not through ideas in their heads but through the actions taking place through duration came to establish and reinforce affinities and an in-depth knowledge of one another. This grew as if a new species of plant had been cross-fertilized. Yet outside of an enabling environment how could that hybrid last? When the consensus is that these people are by definition lacking in emotional, communicative and social capacities that plays a part in any emergence which can not self-maintain in an island reservation.

What happens when the dance stops? When the garden goes? The affinities exist in the practice. Already, one year after the garden was closed down by a hostile charity who had the rights to the land, the link between garden members is vanishing outside of the practices that set it in motion.

One would hope for a loose network of many such related practices that can, as it were drum up particular and unique resonances – that we become adept at invigorating into make-shift habitations that come and go and yet that this capacity remains as a conjoint thinking tool. Outside of these loose structures- as perhaps we already are aware of, we do not have the chance to jump start our many repetitions into variation and therefore into something of interest. Is there a creative equivalent to the admixture that happens in conception? Do we need to mix up parts at every level and at multiple scales all the time as the very process of our individuation- as the conditions for the maintenance of any kind of life?

Yet surely this endless capacity to pop up and then dissipate is in itself part of the patterning- part of the resilience that never dies out completely even as it is passed on from one dying connection to another.