Nomadisch Grün (Green Nomad) launched Prinzessinnengärten (Princess Gardens) as a pilot project in the summer of 2009 on Moritzplatz in Berlin Kreuzberg, a site that had been a wasteland for more than half a century. Along with friends, activists and neighbors, the group cleared trash, built transportable organic vegetable gardens and harvested the first fruits of their labor. Source : Photos de Google Earth (Moritzplatz Berlin 2006/2012) Imagine a future where every available space in big cities is used to allow new green spaces to flourish. Green spaces that residents create themselves and use to produce fresh and healthy food. This would result in increased biological diversity, reduced CO2 emissions and a better microclimate. These spaces would foster a sense of community and the exchange of a wide variety of skills and forms of knowledge, and help people lead more sustainable lives. They would constitute a kind of miniature utopia, a place where a new urban lifestyle can emerge, where people can work together, relax, communicate and enjoy locally produced vegetables. In the future, more and more people will live in cities rather than rural areas. The city will therefore become the decisive place for the development of more sustainable modes of eating, living and traveling. The city of the future should be a pleasant and climate-friendly place to live, where everything is done to preserve our natural resources. Prinzessinnengärten is a new place for urban learning. It’s the place where locals can come together to experiment and learn more about organic food production, biodiversity and climate protection. This space will help them adapt to climate change and become familiar with healthy eating, sustainable living and a future-oriented urban lifestyle. With this project, Nomadisch Grün intends to increase the biological, social and cultural diversity of the neighborhood and pave the way for a new way of living together in the city. Text Source : https://prinzessinnengarten.net/about/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANZIT.RO tranzit is a unique network of civic associations working independently in the field of contemporary art in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania and across the borders of a wider Europe. Its main goal is to support and articulate emancipatory practices, establish connections between culture and society by moving across geographies, generations, and political realms. Each tranzit works under its own conditions in a variety of local cultural and social contexts, using different formats and methods to contextualize, generate or host theoretical, artistic and activist debates around today’s urgencies. tranzit.ro has the particularity of being in its turn a network. Founded in 2012 in Iasi, TRANZIT.RO Association is active in three permanent spaces in Romania (in the cities of Bucharest, Cluj, Iasi), with an additional annual project taking place in Sibiu and numerous national and international collaborations. tranzit.ro is based on solidarity and sharing of resources and it maintains its balance through keeping the autonomy of each centre and opening up for collaborations with different organizations. Its main purpose is maintaining a decentralized institution: which is in each place a hub for ideas on positive social change; which provides a safe space for experiment and exchange; which is dedicated to an integrated and open understanding of contemporary art as a gateway to a whole spectrum of knowledge; and which is raising awareness on the responsibilities and rights of today’s citizens. Here are a few of the tranzit.ro projects: http://ro.tranzit.org/en/project/bucuresti/2018-10-25/collection-collective-launches-website http://ro.tranzit.org/en/exhibition/bucuresti/2019-10-10/artistic-enquiries-into-plants http://ro.tranzit.org/en/exhibition/bucuresti/2017-06-09/the-veil-of-peace

SUMMARY TEXT SOME MORE TEXT HERE Nettle Garden, a connection between consumers, producers, nourishment and land Brândușa and Anselm moved to the countryside in 2013, to the village of Stanciova, Timiș county, drawn towards the idea of a lifestyle more deeply connected to the land and the nourishment it produces. At the same time, the two saw moving to the countryside also as a break from the academic medium, whose essentially theoretical products they didn’t consider too useful. The two met in Germany during their studies, Anselm being a Belgian citizen. Brândușa graduated with a Master’s degree in Rural Development and, prior to moving to Stanciova, she spent a study internship in India. The choice to settle their household in Stanciova was grounded on the existence of a community of young people relocated from Timișoara at the beginning of the 2000s; the group decided to move to the countryside with the purpose of creating a community and of implementing rural development programs. Drawn by the promotion the community made online, through a blog, Brândușa and Anselm came into contact with the members and moved to the village, with the possibility of living in a house renovated by the members of the community; “we only brought our backpacks with us”, Brândușa highlights. Shortly after coming to the village, Brândușa and Anselm bought a piece of land they could afford, with the purpose of building a house to live in and planting a garden. The construction of the house took two years, from 2014 to 2016, during which time the two lived in the community house. For the construction they analysed various alternative construction techniques. They mainly had to choose between a house made from cob and one made from bales, in the end opting for a house made from wheat bales built on a wooden structure, which they considered it offered better thermal isolation. Nettle Garden came into being from the desire of Brândușa and Anselm to produce ecological nourishment for themselves, but for other people, too, which they would sell in a community-supported agriculture (CSA) system. Brândușa manifested interest towards this form of agriculture during her Master’s degree, when she wrote her dissertation about this type of food production and distribution and which she wanted to try first-hand: “and this is why the dream slowly developed, we settle close to Timișoara, all good, so we can start growing vegetables at some point”. Beginning with the spring of 2021, the two managed to gather enough surplus in their production to start selling vegetables, in a CSA system, to around 10-12 consumers in Timișoara who subscribed to their baskets. Nettle Garden is basically the name Brândușa and Anselm gave to their household. It is about 2000 sq.m. and comprises the little bale house, with an annex housing the compost dry toilet and the shower, the vegetable garden, a few fruit trees which were already planted when they bought the land, two solariums, enclosed spaces for geese. In the farmyard, there were tools and farm equipment: electric-hoe, pitchfork to loosen the soil, a “wire boat” whipped up by Anselm to carry hay, but also spaces for stable waste and for compost. Two dogs and a few cats had their homes in the garden. Aside from the garden, they use two adjacent lands to raise hens and geese. One of the lands is rented from a local, and they use another one, abandoned and with uncertain ownership, to raise geese, reclaiming the priority, at least a moral one, in favour of the one who uses the land. Recently, they leased two ha of farmland, but they haven’t undertaken any farm work there yet. The dwelling space has a relatively small area, being built on the footprint of an older mudbrick house. It is composed from a room that serves as a living room, a kitchen, a studio, and an attic accessed through an abrupt wooden stairway, which is used as a bedroom and storage space. The house is heated with a stove built by Anselm using the system of a “rocket-stove”, which he adapted: instead of thick logs, it uses sticks and wooden shards which burn intensely to maximize the efficiency of the burn; the addition he brought to the system is a space made from refractory brick meant to store and radiate heat. Around the house, Brândușa and Anselm were in the process of painting a cement terrace, which they built in order to avoid spreading mud around. When I arrived at Nettle Garden, Anselm was experimenting with a new seeding method, using an instrument he DIY-ed from a leaf blower, to which he attached a plastic bottle used as a seed recipient. He explained that this instrument will help him in the no-till farming they are practicing, where the land is not ploughed or dug, but the superior humus layer is permanently enriched with the purpose of keeping life inside the soil as much as possible: “all the earthworms and the insects in the soil remain there and live their life”, says Anselm. The two insist upon the ideal of keeping life in the soil by using no-till farming, saying they do not agree with ploughing the land every year, as is the usual in classic agriculture, because, on the one hand, it destroys the living things in the soil, and on the other hand, it creates a hardpan layer, below the limit where the plough works, which becomes waterproof. Their technique is sowing the crop directly onto the soil, which they, eventually, lay to the ground or chop, to sow into this one the next crop which will be harvested, or the seedlings. Anselm explains it this way: “I’ve seeded it and the triticale grew all winter. It just sits there, growing, covering the soil and it turns into straws, and when the time came to transplant, we chopped everything with the brush cutter and we were left with a layer of minced straws. (…) And then you haven’t ploughed the soil, you don’t lose water, during winter something grew, I mean, if it was a little bit warmer and the sun would shine, something would grow and would become organic matter, which means it wasn’t dead. The more it grows and you have organic matter, the more you enrich the soil and it becomes looser, water seeps easier, there’s more life and it’s more fertile”. While Anselm was experimenting with the blower, together with Brândușa we made seedlings, with the help of a small manual press, by making little cubes of soil where we planted turnip seeds. She also presented to me a device made by Anselm, which made 200 seedlings at once, which they didn’t use though, as they preferred to plant different varieties. In fact, the garden was abundant in vegetable varieties. I helped Brândușa with harvesting them for the second day distribution. The tomatoes were, by far, the most prevalent; the 200 tomato stalks were very diverse, totalling 10 different varieties. Similarly, the eggplants were purple and white and in various shapes, the courgettes were too, of different varieties. Furthermore, Brândușa confesses she is passionate about experimenting with various uncommon vegetables: tomatillos, cucamelon, Palestinian white cucumbers, as well as mizuna, arugula, mangold. She even admits that this year’s diversity can also be a disadvantage and that she would prefer in the future to settle on less varieties, with the intention to do research among the consumers to determine the varieties she should settle on. The vegetables are planted in alternation with flowers; for example, between tomato rows one finds rows of marigolds, Brândușa saying she would want even more, with the purpose of helping both the pollinators, as well as pest control. She says associating marigolds with tomatoes is a classic combination, as they remove the tomato pests. The ecological agriculture Brândușa and Anselm practice implies the plants are to be exposed as rarely as possible to pest control treatments. The products they use are, most often, nettle soaks made by Brândușa herself, and on the rare occasions where they were forced to buy mass market products, they only used products which are certified for ecological crops and waited a longer time than recommended until the harvest. Although they are not certified as bio producers, Brândușa and Anselm claim they fulfil all the organic farming conditions, the cost of obtaining the certificate being the sole reason they don’t have one yet. The two use exclusively compost and stable waste, the latter which they have to buy for prices they find steep, considering they don’t own animals and, according to them, less and less people in the village do. The compost that results from matter coming from the composting toilet (humanure) isn’t used, because they aren’t fully confident in its safety, being rather a way to ecologically eliminate physiological waste, but sometimes they use it when planting trees. What they do use in the garden from the composting toilet is the liquid part: “diluted pee, because it doesn’t have pathogens and so it’s a good source of nitrogen and phosphorus. We dilute it 1/10”. For the seedlings they either use the seeds they kept, or bought online from other gardeners, from Romania and the Republic of Moldova. It is very important for Brândușa to avoid hybrid seeds, both because they cannot be saved in order to reproduce a similar variety, and because, for ideological reasons, she doesn’t accept buying seeds which are conceived so that the plant cannot be reproduced, and this happens even in the case of plants whose seeds she usually doesn’t save, such as carrots. Aside from the vegetable garden, Brândușa and Anselm are raising hens and geese; they bred the geese from a few goslings they bought and they sacrifice the birds themselves. From the woods, the two gather wild garlic, nettles and mushrooms, rosehip and cornelian cherry; the forest is also a source of dry wood for the fire and even logs which they used to make pillars for the terrace. Brândușa’s and Anselm’s lifestyle doesn’t exclude also using modern techniques and instruments in the garden. The vegetables are watered using a drip irrigation system, the birds are cooped up with an electric fence – the two agree it has been very effective in preventing fox attacks, which at some point they had to fight away. They also wish for a tractor, as a distant goal, to which they could attach no-till farming devices, because ”a tractor isn’t necessarily just a plough”, she explains. And so, the production techniques and the domestic routines of the two are in accordance with an ecological lifestyle, which highlights the respect shown to the land and nourishment. Besides, the domestic routines can hardly be separated from the food production, given that the two aim to live, as much as possible, with and from the land. As part of this lifestyle, the two adapt the classical practices, techniques and means of production, and experiment with alternative practices, routines and tools, which differ from those of the locals. The differences in practice have been noticed by the locals, which were curious and asked for information about how to build a house of bales, while suggesting other techniques: “kind of like, you won’t make it, you know. Or when we were building, neighbours would pass by and tell us, wouldn’t it be cheaper?, something something, if you’d use cinder blocks… I’m not using cinder blocks, that’s that”, Brândușa points out. But she describes the relationship with the villagers as a good one, being bothered however by the neighbours which are used to burning trash as a way of cleaning, or the ones which throw away trash next to their fence, despite the fact that there’s a sanitation and waste sorting service in the village. Brândușa also earned a reputation by being an educator in the village. At the same time, she helps the neighbours with repairing bicycles; she had a repair shop in Timișoara and also organized a repair camp in the village, “where people from other workshops in Europe came over, this kind of anarchist, independent shops”. But she gave up her repair shop so she would dedicate herself to the garden. However, at the present moment, Brândușa and Anselm cannot completely sustain themselves from farming. Anselm is a part-time (60%) employee as an inspector for ecological agriculture, while Brândușa gave up her jobs, including a part-time she had with EcoRuralis, to work in food production. The products of the Nettle Garden are distributed weekly, on a Wednesday, in the Faber space in Timișoara. The two haul the vegetables with their own car and they arrange them in the space where people come to pick it up. The distribution is made using a community-supported agriculture system, in collaboration with the Association for Sustaining Peasant Agriculture, towards around 10 to 12 subscribers. Brândușa shows that this system is not market-oriented, given that the consumers are willing to pay a higher price to sustain ecological peasant initiatives, maybe without expecting an equivalent return: “from what I heard, for some of them it’s important that we have a connection, they’re people who can afford to invest a certain sum of money into a household close to Timișoara, maybe even without getting so much in return, but with the thought of helping some people”. At the same time, her main objective is “being able to feed more people”. The vegetables are picked by Brândușa and Anselm on the distribution days, so that they are as fresh as possible. Alongside vegetables, their baskets include, as a bonus, eggs or plants picked form the forest: nettles, wild garlic. The harvest is weighed prior to the distribution and Brândușa counts the vegetables for each consumer, without portioning the quantities. The subscribers are encouraged to bring paper bags to get their products, after each portion is weighed with a scale. A WhatsApp group is used to organize the distribution and keep in touch. Distribution doesn’t mean just delivering the vegetables, but also, as Brândușa points out, knowledge about how they should be cooked, especially the lesser known ones, like tomatillos: “I’ll feel sorry if they don’t use something because they don’t know how and it ends up in the compost. I’d feel so bad, because I worried about that fruit. So it’s in my interest if they eat each gram of the vegetables they receive. (…) we talk on the spot, we look for recipes, they give advice to each other, we have a WhatsApp group and we post recipes there”. The distribution takes place in a generally sociable atmosphere, the relatively small group that comes constantly for the delivery showing a certain cohesion; they often stay for a chat and to socialize after the vegetables are handed out. The distribution space, specifically chosen by Anselm in a popular enough place for youngsters in Timișoara, is featuring various pieces of urban furniture made from wood, coloured in black and purple, in a geometric, modern style. Inside the space, you find a restaurant with a terrace and various shops placed in metal containers, selling even craft beer. Thus, after the distribution of the vegetables, for an hour or two, the consumers socialize and drink beer and other stuff they buy on the spot. The subscriber group comprises middle class people; a Political Science professor from the Western University in Timișoara, also a subscriber, notices: “this thing is very posh, professors, artists. I would like something for the working class”. At the end of the night, together with Brândușa and Anselm, we collected the crates and went back to Stanciova. A few members of the consumers group left together to keep hanging out in some other place in the Fabric neighbourhood. Research and text by Alexandru Vârtej Translation by Dana Andrei The research is part of Regenerative-Reliable-Resourceful, the mapping of resilient practices in the Romanian countryside that tranzit.ro develops in the frame of C4R and of the Experimental Station for Research.

In 2021 a group of cultural workers together with tranzit.ro, bought together a plot of land 40 km. north of Bucharest, where we are building The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life. Amongst others, the Station aims to become a working place for artists and researchers interested in thinking a different relationship to nature. As such, we are striving to plant and maintain a garden that is responding to the challenges of climate change, which is paying attention to the local biodiversity and is at the same time permeable to metissage and cultural embedding. Cosmos Garden, drawing its name from the plant originating from Mexico, Cosmos bipinnatus, is proposed by landscape designer Georgiana Strat as “a living laboratory of experimentation for nature, art and life. The purpose is testing, observing and foregrounding of models that creatively answer to themes such as: the decrease of water resources, conservation of biodiversity, migration of plants and animal species, models of sustainable feeding, fighting desertification etc.” Georgiana Strat proposed a site analysis, a concept for the Cosmos Garden and a plan for the planting, and we presented these plans as part of the itinerating exhibition “Now the Impulse is to Live!”.

A public event: Gilles Clément in dialogue with Civic Movement R-Urban 27 July 2021, 6 pm Casa Filipescu-Cesianu, Calea Victoriei 151, Bucharest “As planetary gardeners, we depend on all the biological diversity that we harness for a living. We must preserve it to ensure a future. What kind of model do we want to develop, to allow both the exploitation of diversity for the benefit of an expanding world population, and the preservation, in quality and quantity terms, of that diversity on which we depend? We must respond to this question as quickly as possible if we are not to succumb to the inevitability of irreversible forces of destruction, but rather to develop in every conceivable field a mental territory of optimism – a garden.” (Gilles Clément, 2021) Gilles Clément is a French gardener, landscape designer, botanist, entomologist and writer. He is the author of several groundbreaking concepts in the framework of landscaping, such as “moving garden” (jardin en mouvement), “planetary garden” (jardin planétaire) and “third landscape” (tiers paysage). For his many landscape projects including the André Citroën Park, the Quai Branly Garden or the Henri-Matisse Park in Lille, he has received the “Grand Prix du paysage“ in 1998. Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou (atelier d’architecture autogérée) develop ecological projects carried out with/by citizens, nomadic devices and urban strategies. For their projects (which include EcoBox, Passage 56, R-Urban, Wiki Village Factory, Vision 2030 Seine Saint Denis) they have received a number of international awards including Resilient Building Prize 2018 and European Political Innovation Prize in Ecology 2017. Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu represent R-Urban, a civic movement which supports the emergence of alternative models of living, producing and consuming between the urban and the rural. The event in Bucharest is organised by tranzit.ro/ Bucuresti and AAA as part of the project C4R. Jardin Arche de la Défense. Gilles Clément Agrocité Biodiversité, 2014. R-Urban, aaa

Les Murs à pêches is located in the heights of Montreuil and still represent 35 hectares of gardens, wastelands, partially occupied, inhabited or allocated to associations that maintain them and defend them from commercial and real estate interests. The diversity of its occupants and inhabitants makes the great richness of this territory. The Fédération des Murs à pêches groups together 16 associations and collectives working on this territory. Some associations occupy, thanks to twelve-year agreements, municipal plots for the most part. The rest of the plots belong to the department, the region or the State, and some are privately owned. Every year since 2000, it organizes the Festival des Murs à pêches, in order to make known and defend this territory through arts and cultures. Each association organizes its own events the rest of the time. Source texte and images: Fédération Murs à Pêches de Montreuil

Resilient practices in the Romanian countryside Statistics show that in 2020 around 78 thousand people moved to the villages from urban centres in Romania, not counting those who have returned home from abroad. In itself, it is not a very telling statistics, as almost double this number moved the other way around and, comparing to other EU countries, Romania still has one of the highest rates of poverty in the rural areas. What is interesting is that the majority of those deciding to “downshift” to the countryside are the middle-class who can afford the telework. They want to reconnect with nature, with their families’ roots, they take classes on permaculture, they exchange advice, photos and business ideas with peers on the many Facebook dedicated groups – the most famous of which, “Moved to the countryside. Life without the clock” counts now 147000 members, having doubled in the year of the lockdown . Within this trend, a special place is occupied by those who make this move as not only an individual life-style, but also trying to be consistent with a sustainable and ecological living with and for larger communities. We are looking at practices that redefine the relationship with the countryside, with land and soil, with nature, with food and natural resources, with the rural communities and also with people in the big cities who are looking for sustainable alternatives to their lives. We are mapping some of these practices: a regenerative farm in Dambovita; an ecological farm that delivers fresh products to people in Bucharest, also in a village in Dambovita county; a community and educational centre built on ecological principles in Mogosoaia; a village eco-touristic campus and co-working space in Banat region, and others. A more in-depth mapping takes place of a series of case-studies on ecological or regenerative farms or gardens, thus focusing this part of the research on a different approach to the land as not only provider of resources but also as a fragile ecosystem that needs to be tendered and respected. We are conducting sociological interviews, interpreting them, we are asking questions about motivations, structure, sustenance, difficulties encountered, awareness of the wider contexts and of the climate change impact. In addition, we are observing with artistic means (video-documents, sketches, drawings, notations), in order to situate these case-studies within a larger picture of emancipatory practices in the relation between people, nature and communities.