Future Gardens as Eco-Cultural Collaborations

The Harrisons describe their first "Future Garden, the Garden of Hot Winds and Warm Rains" (1995), proposed for a museum in Bonn as “...a multi-layered story told with artifacts, media events, texts, and living materials, which all together engage the probable Greenhouse future directly. It is a work of art that will be garden, prediction, and promenade, a voyage of sorts... The task we set for this work is the exploration of eco-cultural collaborations that would make for a future no longer based on extraction. ... these gardens look at what a future could be like if conscious, mutually beneficial collaborations between human cultures (civilizations in all their complexities) and the cultures of nature (the life webs complicating and diversifying up to the space and energy available) became a norm.”

What does this multi-layered story look and feel like in the present?

Join us for a panel discussion with people who have collaborated with the Harrisons on Future Gardens including current on the ground proposals. The panel is moderated by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle. Featured speakers include:

Josh Harrison, son of Helen and Newton and currently director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz.

Laura and Benny Filmore, Elders of the Washoe Tribe who worked with Helen and Newton Harrison on the Future Garden at Sagehen and continue to advise that project.

Leslie Ryan, landscape architect and Co-Investigator for the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz.

Barbara Benish, artist and Advisor to the United Nations who is developing a Future Garden at ArtMill in the Czech Republic.

Presented in conjunction with the Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego's PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work.