INTERZONES: Embedded in The Postnatural Garden - Laura Skehan
Laura Skehan ( Ireland )
During her residency at ZK/U, Laura Skehan lead a research project that explored the garden and the local community's relationship with the space around ZK/U. Through conversation and storytelling, care and compassion, her aim was to nurture and build a community and a creative framework to plant, grow and tend to the collective memory of the participants in her work, and using the observations she made while working with the garden, Skehan will continue to explore the concept of nature and culture as a collective. Her aim is to uncover a 'public' that encompasses both the human and the more than human through a series of propositions that have the potential to become political action.
The research unfolded through sculptural interventions, video and sound installations, exploring embedded identity and queer ecologies within these public spaces that are often contested due to the social complexities of gentrification. In this way Skehan relates the socio-economic concept to a fungus feeding on cultural memory, while she uses writing and performance techniques to reflect on the use of urban green spaces as sites of ritual for counter-cultural movements, anti-capitalism and grassroots activism.
Funded partly by EU Culture Moves Europe.