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Temporary urban garden: teasing Adonis

Responding to an international call for the ‘Un-built’ 2008 international architecture research events, ‘The Temporary Urban Garden: Teasing Adonis’ was an original installation project that questioned the public space boundaries for marginalised social groups. This exploration of how such spatial relationships could be understood, negotiated and represented in European cities was extended to London in 2009 through the ‘No Place Like Home’ public exhibition events and debates.

The ancient myth of Adonis reveals the role of women and other marginalised groupings in the Greek ‘polis’. Using the examples of the short-lived gardens that Athenian women planted in mockery of Adonis's festival, and exploring the function of vegetation through spices like mint, myrrh and cinnamon, the installation examined how historical knowledge could become a tool for critical practice.

Utilising tacit knowledge, the installation project drew parallels, through smells, objects and animations, between the exclusion of women in ancient times and the current exclusion of the public from dominant developments in public spaces, by producing particular demarcations. Archival images were transformed through novel programming and time-based animation, coupled with gentle obstructions of movement enabling the history of exclusion to be experienced and critically reconnected to everyday life.

The installation was displayed to experts and the wider public in Athens Museum and later for the ‘No Place Like Home’ series of installations in four European cities. This set challenging debates between academia and practice by revealing, recreating and questioning lines of previously hidden contested demarcations present in these cities. The project was published in ‘Blueprint’ (January 2010).

The work sets a significant challenge to professional and public audiences, demonstrating how the contemporary city may be re-planned in terms of small-scale interventions in which the margins of society may have a spatial and political role to play.

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