Garden's politics

Historically, gardens have been places associated with the privileged classes, but they are also places where the collective can aspire to embody their own alternative realities. In this research, we will tell the stories of a series of gardens in which the power to represent a diverse social order has been exercised from the top down as well as from the bottom up. We will discuss the botanic garden and the atomic garden; and another gardens such as the garden Nelson Mandela built while in prison, Derek Jar- man’s garden-retreat, or the Vauxhall pleasure gardens.

Our intention is to demonstrate that the political circumstances surrounding the garden end up influencing its very conception. To this end, we will understand the garden from a political point of view, framed from the ownership of land and the rules that regulate the garden space; from the domestication of the species that inhabit it, in relation to the place in which we position ourselves as human beings in opposition to other species; also from the garden as heterotopia; and likewise, as a scenario from which to question the status quo.