Haystack03 - with Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen and Nina Pope
Date uploaded: July 4, 2013
Haystack 03
with artist/film-maker Nina Pope (Somewhere, London) and
sociologist/garden activist Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen (Berlin)
Taking place on Saturday 6th July at 4pm at Abbey Gardens on Bakers Row in Stratford (map).
In her book The Porridge Quarrel – Ecology and Gender in the History of Food Cultures, Elisabeth describes a number of emancipatory movements which have shaped the way we eat and serve food collectively. From the shift of eating warm porridge to white bread, French post-revolutionary dinner tables, vegetarianism at the end of the 19th century and a social history of public houses.
Nina is going to introduce What Will the Harvest Be, a community harvest garden built on a formerly derelict site at Abbey Gardens. The influences behind the project relate back to the original Cistercian Abbey where monks used the land as a site of great productivity. The intriguing Plaistow Landgrabbers also inspired the artists and provided the project title.
Elisabeth and Nina are going to informally talk about these different movements and histories and relate them to current community garden initiatives and politics.
Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen is a Berlin based social historian and garden activist. Her research and writing includes gender studies with a focus on rural women and small holdings, food histories related to social and emancipatory movements, peasant movements and globalised agriculture. She is currently involved in the Allmende-Kontor an urban gardening and networking project in Berlin.
Nina Pope together with Karen Guthrie are the artist/film-maker group Somewhere, who initiate and produce collaborative, multi-disciplinary projects. Following the initiative by the 'Friends of Abbey Gardens', to make the derelict site open for public use, 'Somewhere' as the invited artist team proposed a public-access ‘harvest garden’ of fruit, flowers and vegetables that literally anyone can use: What Will the Harvest Be. The garden was launched in 2009 and is now run by the Friends of Abbey Gardens.
Thank you to the Friends of Abbey Gardens for having Haystack 03 on their site.
Haystacks are monthly events to talk about rural practices, realities and links.
