Reflections on biome: experiments in radical kinship

Artist, writer and human ecologist Zoë Laureen Palmer looks back on her year-long residency in the Artsadmin Canteen. biome: experiments in radical kinship ran from July 2023 to July 2024.

A year ago we – myself and multiple collaborators, began making small, experimental offerings from Artsadmin’s home in Toynbee Studios.  We sought to explore possibilities for enhancing biodiversity and creating kinship with the more than human world, asking:  how might we cultivate relationship with our inner and outer landscapes, our biomes? What practises and mundane rituals might support us in this work?   

The devastating effects of habitat loss due to intensive agriculture, coupled with climate change have contributed to the UK becoming one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. As I walked around the small patch of grass and beds that make up Mallon Gardens that sense of depletion was palpable: the odd nettle, common mallow, ribwort plantain, groundsel, fleabane, speedwell, one lone white butterfly.  By contrast, from a human perspective the place was thriving – people filled its many benches, the pavement and road that run along the garden’s western edge were heaving with bodies and traffic respectively, the many buildings surrounding us tall, solid, apparently successful and invulnerable to the natural decay of life.  In that moment I was briefly haunted by a powerful sense of loss, a sense of what might have flourished here before us, the forests, wetlands, scrub.  Whilst much of that loss can be attributed to natural processes of ecological succession, creating opportunities to explore the biome in deep time through honouring these plant hauntings: oak forests, alder, birch, pine, hazel, willow and spruce, felt like rich place to start. 

“I think about grief as a measure of our love, that grief compels us to do something, to love more”

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Over the next four seasons, we met and shared biome encounters with a wide range of audiences. In the Autumn biome: ballroom event, as part of my emerging practise with sound artist Keir Vine we invited people to listen, dream and surrender into peatland landscape and relationality asking: is it possible to feel intimacy with biomes we have neither physical nor temporal proximity to?  Moving into Winter, Keir and I continued our collaboration in biome: forrest – a tiny installation in the Artsadmin Canteen where over forty plant and moss species lived, thrived and died in parallel with the day to day operations of the space.  In this very public arena we came face to face with natural cycles of death in all its imperfection and messiness, its odours, colours and rhythm.  It was unsettling, challenging and a call to the mundane rituals of watering and paying attention to the plants respiring in exchange with us.   

Taking cuttings from the forrest we worked with a group from Women for Refugee Women to create kokedama through the Japanese gardening tradition of working with houseplants. Wrapping, tying and tightening string around her compacted ball of moss, Tracey reflected: 

“my kokedama was giving me trouble when I tried to put her in a good place…but I will look after her, she has to trust me and I have to trust her when we are watering each other…I am happy with you my friend, welcome.” 

Tracey’s poetic description of plants and people watering each other is akin to the web of reciprocity indigenous biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer guides us towards in her book ‘The Democracy of Species’.  For Kimmerer, re-balancing our relationship with the natural world comes through recognising that we co-exist in a web of kinship and reciprocity.

As Winter turned to Spring we sought to expand this web through a co-design and planting practise that transformed the undeveloped beds on the southern edge of Mallon Gardens into the biodiversity rest up garden – a space for multispecies rest and flourishing.  As we cleared cigarette butts and sunk our hands into the wet, barren, gritty soil, we were surprised to find it teeming with life. Fleshy earthworms writhed urgently between our fingers, astonished by the light – amongst them we planted euphorbia, sedum, heuchera, hart’s tongue fern and a wildflower strip – all chosen to maximise diversity and provide habitat and nectar supply to pollinators. 

In truth, we have no idea whether the garden will flourish or what it might be in ten, fifty, a hundred years from now, but for this brief moment it serves as an act of hope.  A tiny site of resistance and collective imagination, a space to slow down in an environment dominated by colonial time – a living manifestation of our year experimenting in radical kinship. With gratitude to the many visible and invisible inhabitants of the biome, the staff team at Artsadmin, collaborators Will Gould, Keir Vine, Kookie Blue, Ali Yellop, Johanna Tagada Hoffbeck, Hanif Ali, members of the public who showed up, dreamed and planted, the Community Climate Champions, John Archer, Tower Habitats, Toynbee Hall, Christchurch Primary Forest School and Alba Caffe.

biome: experiments in radical kinship was supported by BE PART, through the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, Tower Habitats, and Arts Council England.