The four gatherings are co-curated with Toni Kritzer and Emilie Gallier addressing themes and questions emerging from their long term research into plant wisdom and practices of rest. The gatherings build upon the experience of the 3 years old community garden installed on the rooftop of the Academy of Theatre and Dance. The gatherings fall within the scope of Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca’s special Chair in Performance Philosophy: aiming to strengthen the connections and opportunities for dialogue between the artist-researchers at AHK and researchers at UvA.

Since April 2023, herbs, vegetables and flowers, grow and thrive above the school. In this unlikely space eight stories above ground, the garden is an invitation and a commitment to rehearse and embody ecological care. As many minor gestures of care accumulate, the garden above the school gets tended to. And, in many ways, the plants tend to the humans of the school: feeding them, nourishing them, inviting them to rest and reflect. The garden’s relationship to the education institute is layered, subversive, slow-moving and profound: we learn differently, underneath and with a garden. The garden is a space for co-learning: In the regular garden gatherings, a garden pedagogy is formed, and it seeps through soil like water and then into the hands that work the soil.

In these regular open events - the garden gatherings - the larger community around the garden comes together, tending to the relationality that makes a garden thrive. Collective gardening work such as composting, harvesting, and planting enters into conversation with the artistic practices of invited artists. Through these reciprocal relations with the garden, these dialogues resist extractive impulses: recognizing extractivism both in creative workers and the field, and in the larger colonial relationship to earth-as-resource.

“What do we need to remember that will push back against the forgetting encouraged by consumer culture and linear time?” Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

The garden gatherings are moments where entanglements become visible, where students, artists, teachers, gardeners, staff, and researchers, collectively practice ecological care, cultivating - amidst the tomatoes and beans - agency and interspecies relationality. Guided by the visiting artists-teachers, we position gardening as an art of relations. The garden generously hosts our considerations of care, control, institutional demands and an anarchic commoning, and the emerging pedagogy of the garden shapes us as much as we shape the garden in return. Collectively, we investigate what it means to garden in a precarious urban environment, above an art school, and how we can learn to care for the (more-than)-human communities of this garden. Over the years, the garden gatherings have become a space with a distinct garden pedagogy and epistemology.

While a lot of plants grow lowly and twisted, battered by winds and tested by droughts, they teach us about resilience - growing in an increasingly hostile environment, yet insisting on mutual flourishing. As Neslihan Kaymak writes in the garden zine from 2024, reflecting on belonging in “the city that constantly makes you move, that constantly evicts, demolishes and rebuilds”: “Still, we show up. Still, we bloom”.

This fall-winter, we would love ASCA’s support for four garden gatherings that deepen these interspecies relationships in the community garden: reflecting on climate grief, queer and crip ecologies, and collective rest. Moving into a darker season, the garden invites us and the participants of the coming gatherings into moments of slowness, rest, and softening.

The proposed program continues the ASCA seminars Climate Imaginaries: performing thinking with land and weather and relates to the work of researcher Dr Leni Van Goidsenhoven on crip theory, Mad and Critical Disability Studies, with a specific focus on accessibility aesthetics, disability heritage, and disability activism. Connection will be made to these past and ongoing activities by inviting ASCA colleagues for these and future events (as participants, speakers, and fellow gardeners).

Gathering #1 - Earthly Suns
Date/time:  Thursday 17th September, 4-6pm
Guest speaker: Sasa Ghanem-Chaney and Jules Davis-Dufayard
ASCA respondent: Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca with Rajni Shah
Location: Academy of Theater and Dance, Garden Above the School, Jodenbreestraat 3 (8th floor/rooftop)

At the threshold between late summer and fall, we gather in the garden above the school: to meet Saint John’s wort, a medicinal plant that might help us carry some summer sunshine into the darker months. Saint John’s wort shines wherever grief and pain are present, as earthly suns radiating a resilient kind of joy. The artists who will host this gathering - Jules Davis-Dufayard and Sasa Ghanem-Chaney - have been befriending Saint John’s Wort, through herbalism, storytelling, trauma-informed care practices, and vocal somatics for two years. In this garden gathering, they warmly invite us into considerations around reciprocity, climate grief and queer collective care.

earthly suns is a multidisciplinary research project, developed by Jules Davis-Dufayard and Sasa Ghanem-Chaney, that departs from a shared love towards the plant Saint-John’s-Wort, and a shared love for communal singing. Together they have embarked on a long-term research around this plant-ally since summer 2025, inspired by the queer poetics it offers as it grows powerful and unnoticed between Amsterdam’s pavements. They hope to develop land and body based seasonal practices which are relevant to the current context of late-stage racial capitalism, and which can contribute to the physical, emotional and spiritual nourishment of current social/ecological change movements.

After a summer of long and profound drought in NL, and massive wildfires all across Europe, St. John’s Wort offers itself as a much needed medicine: itself a highly drought-resistant plant, blossoming at the very height of summer, it is also a herbal ally for processing grief. Finding ourselves in the unfolding climate catastrophe, we turn to our plant kin to work with a kind of grief that doesn’t paralyze, but itself can spark and nourish resistance to the death-making machinery of capitalism/colonialism.

Garden work:

• Collectively harvesting herbs and preparing them to be dried for tea or burning.
• Cutting back herbs in early fall and late summer is important to encourage new growth, and sustains perennial plants for many years.

Suggested reading:

• Joanna Macy and Molly Brown Coming back to life, the guide to the work that reconnects
• Camille Sapara Barton Tending Grief, embodied rituals for holding our sorrow and growing cultures of care in community
• Susan Raffo Liberated to the bone, histories, bodies, futures
• Rupa Marya and Raj Patel Inflammed, deep medicine and the anatomy of injustice

Biographies

Sasa Ghanem-Chaney (French-Algerian, 1993) is an artist, performer, director and facilitator based in Amsterdam since 2017. They work with worldbuilding, interactive installations, collective processes, sound, performance and herbalism. Their practice questions the politics of history-making. What are the invisible frameworks at play in the decision of archiving? Which lores subsist to shape our contemporary perspectives? How can we slow down and listen to the unsung echoes of voices past? Through speculative storytelling, performance, immersive spaces and collective practices, Sasa Ghanem-Chaney questions the making of stories and our political role in the remembrance of minoritized voices.

Jules Davis-Dufayard (France, 1991) is an artist/facilitator, and an apprentice of somatics and transformative justice, currently living in a white trans crip/disabled body. They facilitate experiences with/in nature to create internal and collective space for growth and transformation, nurturing healing ways to relate to ourselves, each other, and the webs of relations we are embedded in. At the moment, Jules is fascinated by crip and gut wisdoms, and by practices of herbalism, foraging and eating as everyday and embodied portals to remembering that “the earth isn’t an extension of our bodies, it’s the other way around” (GTDF).

Gathering #2 - Queer ecologies quilting workshop
Date/time: Friday 2nd October, 4-6pm
Guest speaker: Toni Kritzer in collaboration with WOEKER festival Antwerp
ASCA/UvA respondent: Slava Greenberg tbc.
Location: Academy of Theater and Dance, Garden Above the School, Jodenbreestraat 3 (8th floor/rooftop)

Artist and gardener Toni Kritzer will guide us through this queer ecologies quilt making session, with storytelling, herbal tea, and queer plant lore. Stitching fabrics and stories together, we will be co-designing one part of a wider quilt; working primarily with fabric painting and embroidery. The wider quilt is commissioned by WOEKER festival Entwerp, inviting four artists involved in a large participatory quilt making through the fall 2026. The quilt will take the form of a four-panel work and will be developed collectively through a series of community making sessions. The overarching visual theme is inspired by wild plants, spontaneous growth, and the ways in which life flourishes beyond imposed boundaries. The fourth of the quilt crafted under Toni Kritzer’s guidance is a tiny garden, overgrown by queer plants: icons such as lavender and pansies, herbal allies for HRT, and other plants we feel akin to in our unruly queerness.

With the larger project taking cues from the AIDS Memorial Quilt, Toni’s approach to this project weaves together narratives of illness, queerness, and care. From a trans* and crip perspective, they are curious about resistant engagements with the medical-industrial complex, such as DIY HRT (hormone replacement therapy), and the shared enmeshment in ideological narratives of “natural” and “unnatural”. The garden quilt recognizes plants as deeply entangled with these ongoing histories and as powerful comrades, whether in Prospect Cottage or other queer gardens.

Garden work:

• Mulching the beds with straw. Mulching is a crucial part of tending to the garden, keeping the soil covered to sustain the microbial life within and aid with water retention. In this gathering, the mulch is covering up the beds for fall and winter, like humans would cuddle underneath a blanket/quilt.

Suggested reading:

• Eli Claire Unfurl/Brilliant imperfection
• Jan Zita Grover AIDS and other clear cuts
• Derek Jarman Modern Nature

Biography

Toni Kritzer is a trans*, white, chronically ill/disabled performance artist and gardener, based in Amsterdam. There and elsewhere, they forage for stories beyond the human, and share these stories through artistic research, critical walking practices, and performance. With a background in theater, their work is interdisciplinary and includes performance, writing, facilitating, and communal gardening. In 2024, they graduated from the Academy of Theater and Dance Amsterdam with a degree in Theater Directing, and are an associate researcher at DAS. At the ATD, they initiated a community garden in 2023, where they host a series of events that anchor gardening within art education, and explore/embody ecological (community) care. Most recently, they are tending to narratives of disability and illness within ecosystems, following slugs, viruses, and weeds. Since 2025, they are a part of the temporary master “Monstrous Futurities” at Sandberg Instituut.

WOEKER is a multidisciplinary artistic & activist program where trans, intersex, agender, non­binary and genderfluid artists take center stage. From 13 to 29 November, it will unfold across Antwerp, Ghent, Leuven, Hasselt, Bruges and Brussels. It is initiated by Antwerp Queer Arts Festival and Genderspectrum, who organized Belgium’s first Trans Remembrance Expo last year. WOEKER takes its name from the Dutch word for unruly growth — life that insists on itself where it shouldn’t be able to, like weeds pushing through cracks in asphalt. We recognize this same vitality in trans and gender diverse communities: being told we are “out of place” yet cultivating new ways of living, caring, imagining, and resisting.

Gathering #3 - Stories to sleep to
Date/time: 13.11 (provisional) 5pm-7pm
Guest speaker: Mayomi Basnayaka with a guest artist
ASCA/UvA respondent: tbd.
Location: Academy of Theater and Dance, Garden Above the School, Jodenbreestraat 3 (8th floor/rooftop)

The wonderful artist Mayomi Basnayaka will return to the garden above the school with her project Stories to sleep to, to guide us and the garden into winter hibernation. We wonder: what kind of lullaby would a garden need to transition into wintertime?

Stories to Sleep to is an ongoing performance series where artists of color, whose practices resonate with the decolonial theory of slowness, use narrative and sonic works to invite rest. Through the age-old form of the bedtime story, they share folklore, personal mythologies, and dreamlike fictions rooted in their cultural and artistic practices. Born from a longing for more restful, comfortable ways to share narratives, the series reimagines storytelling as a collective descent into dreaming.

Questions of slowness and adjacent temporalities come up time and time again in the garden above the school. The temporality of the garden and its more than human community plays out at a much slower pace than the rush of school life: the slow unfurling of leaves, the expansion of a rhizomatic network, the ripening of fruit in fall. It offers not just a break to the students and others, but a different rhythm altogether: the persistent slow motion growth of plants functions as a reminder that there need be no rush, that the busyness of the institution is not the only rhythm available. As the rooftop is a place people come to for short breaks, the plants gently invite them to linger a little in a different temporality. As Mac Griswold puts it: “Gardening has been called the slowest of the performing arts” (National Gallery of Art Archives Washington 1988) and as such, it grows time, like it grows strawberries and sage.

In a world where rest is often solitary, privatized, or inaccessible, in this event we position the garden as a space for communal rest, where softness, quiet, and dreaming become shared practices. Welcoming overworked and under-rested bodies, participants are invited to snore, dream, or simply lie down and rest through the performance. Here, performance is not something to stay alert for, but something to soften into, napping through the dominant expectations of presence, attention, and productivity.

The performance is both an offering and an invitation: to slow down, listen differently, and dream in the company of others. After the session, a meal with ingredients from the garden above the school invites into conviviality and soft chatter, slipping into hibernation season together.

Garden work:

• Tucking bulbs and seeds into the soil. Some plants (like daffodils, crocuses and snowdrops) need to be planted in fall to have a good winter’s sleep, so they can sprout early in spring. We collectively tuck them in for hibernation, with the horizon of spring in mind as we slip into the dark season.

Suggested reading:

• Tricia Hersey Rest is Resistance
• Bell Hooks Belonging: A Culture of Space
• Laura Doyle, Simon Gikandi, and Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji Decolonial Reconstellations (Vol. 1: Dynamics of Deep Time and Deep Place)
• Dr. Jo-Ann Archibald (Q'um Q'um Xiiem) Indigenous Storywork
• Curatorium The Rest is Up to Us

Biography

Mayomi Basnayaka is a Sri Lankan artist based in Amsterdam, navigating her artistic research practice through embodied knowledge, decolonial theory, and story-telling. She often includes her audience as a key-role in the work as it unfolds through interactive installation, durational performance, and material workshops. Weaving narratives that reflect the multicultural complexities of belonging and displacement, she expands space for migrant communities, as her practice seeks to engage with communities beyond traditional art spaces, bridging artistic practice and everyday life.

Gathering #4 - Winter retreat: wat sluimert er in mijn rust?
Date/time: 14.01 4pm-6pm
Guest speaker: Emilie Gallier and Nina Boas
ASCA/UvA respondent: Leni Van Goidsenhoven tbd.
Location: Academy of Theater and Dance, Garden Above the School, Jodenbreestraat 3 (8th floor/rooftop)

In this two-hours workshop, ATD Lectorate researcher Emilie Gallier shares practices and observations from years of holding quiet space environments at a number of temporary events. These reflections will dialogue with practices she develops together with artist Nina Boas and young people with disability (at the social daycare center Cordaan, and Wildekunst) and a longer-term engagement (five years) organizing and hosting winter retreats at the collective regenerative garden Les Minières which she co-founded in France.

What slumbers in my rest? What is dormant?

Benefitting from winter time, encouraging us to draw from our deepest reserves, we will tune in to what moves from under surfaces. With earthworms as Gallier and Boas’ guiding allies, we will fold inward to sense tiny movements. We will ask the gardens what they want, ask our bodies, exchange seeds, enter dreamworlds. We will tend to the things that hold us (including schedules, plannings, and spatial arrangements) in search for ways for the dormant seeds to flourish.

Garden work:

• Observation, asking what might the garden want? Sitting with the garden, standing with the garden, folding with the garden, covering with the garden. Seed-swapping. Exchanging with other gardens.

Suggested reading:

• Tricia Hersey We will rest ! The Art of Escape
• Zine The Garden Above the School
• Leni Van Goidsenhoven Ongehoord Over kleine interacties wanneer woorden niet vanzelfsprekend zijn

Biography
Emilie Gallier (she, her) is held by soils in Leiden (The Netherlands) and Les Minières (France). She is an embodied reader, a dancer, a gardener, a mother, a researcher with curiosity for situations of holding and being held, reading with a tactile gaze, and for being in the world head down-butt up. Through dance, textures (of papers and textiles), poetic documentation, and in collaborative ways, she studies and develops soil connections practices, in close relationship with biodiversity and diversity of experiences, resisting all forms of domination.

2021 was a pivot year for Emilie. She self-published her doctoral thesis in the form of a partly edible book: ‘Reading in Performance, Lire en Spectacle’ (Coventry University). She co-founded the association Les Minières in Normandie, gathering within rurality, regenerative agriculture and artistic practices. She initiated the collaborative project ‘Gleaners and the Worms’ with visual artists Nina Boas (host, education, rituals) and Nienke Terpsma (graphic design, edition, conversation).

Emilie is a Researcher with the ATD Lectorate and a tutor/head-heart of THIRD together with Rajni Shah. Her research relates to soil connections, interspecies performance, earthworms, poetic-ongoing-participatory documentation, social justice.