A growing chorus: practising the commons with a housing estate gardening group

Abstract

A Growing Chorus is a practice-based and interdisciplinary study into the theory and practices of the commons to enquire whether these might incorporate nonhuman, as well as human, lives and activities. It is carried out through a durational and dialogical engagement with a housing estate in South London and the activities of a gardening group based there. It places this small-scale engagement in relationship to large-scale ecological crises.A methodology based on Donna Haraway’s ‘situated knowledges’ accommodates the perspective of the researcher as an artist resident at the site of research and ‘full member’ of the gardening group. It tests theory against practice on the ground, and combines a subjective viewpoint with different voices from the estate and gardens, archival material, art practices, science and theory. Approaches derived from dialogical art practice are deployed in the context of community gardening to establish a foundation of human solidarity from which the capacity of humans to recognise the role of nonhumans in their garden commons is explored.Having examined the role of human perception in relation to ecologically destructive behaviours, and the limitations of the commons in a context of climate and ecological crisis, the study proposes an attunement to symbiotic relations through the garden and a noticing of the ‘polyphony’, after Anna Tsing, of human–nonhuman activities. Clarice Allgood’s ‘perceptual commons’ and an attention to sound, drawing on acoustic ecology, provide an arena in which these might be recognised. Finally Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening is tested as a means of changing habits of perception, enabling humans to perceive and participate in the polyphonic commons of the garden.