S03E36: In Full Bloom

In full bloom – a conversation between Angela Jerardi and Giulia Bellinetti in the gardens of Jan van Eyck Academy 

What does it mean to make a garden a site for ecological practice, pedagogy and labor within the context of an art institution? What experiences, aesthetics and frictions emerge through gardening? 

This episode takes us to the gardens of the artist residency of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, where our guest, teacher, researcher, and writer Angela Jerardi is invited to be in conversation with the head of the Nature Research department and coordinator of Future Materials of the Jan van Eyck Academy, and PhD researcher at ASCA, Giulia Bellinetti. 

In a courtyard where branches overgrow steel structures, and ivy foliage softens their voices, and dampens their footsteps, Angela and Giulia speak on how they have moved their teaching, research and writing into gardens and land practices. Walking between pumpkins, bamboo, and compost, they reflect on the questions, labor and hardships that have maintained their care work. How is seasonal time or lived time affected by the demands of institutional time? How can we attune ourselves to the pace and divergence of lived time of species? Speaking on strategies that art institutions employ to bring forth topics of ecology, land and climate, they reflect on how concepts and verbs can become increasingly metaphorical and rhetorical in art discourses. Walking in fall leading into winter, they move towards the edges of the garden where transformative questions have taken root, for you to anticipate their full bloom. 

This episode is in two parts. 

In the first part, departing from the soil, Angela and Giulia unpack how a garden affects and takes shape in each of their practices, and what this means in the context of an art institution. 

After the break, their conversation leads them into the glass house of the garden where their conversation spans strategies that artists, communities and art institutions employ, and the relationships that emerge through them. 

Part One (00:00 – 37:10) and Part Two (37:55 – 1:31:00). 

Take a breath and tune into the warm autumn breeze and whispering leaves on their walk in these gardens.