kulturlandschaften: learning about histories and establish new links

kulturlandschaften

Kulturlandschaften was a participative urban gardening project by Meike Schalk & Erika Mayr together with Donne Nissà for Summer Drafts, in Bolzano, 3-11 July 2010.

Donne Nissà is a grassroots association of and for migrant women, http://www.nissa.bz.it , who engage in a number of activities such as giving legal advice, supporting women working in the care sector, running a kindergarten, and a number of cultural projects that deal with multiculturalism such as theater, literature, café, and course activities. Donne Nissà is based in the district of Don Bosco where they obtained the permission to re-cultivate a part of 1000 sqm of overgrown public land for community gardening, at Via Bari off Via Alessandria.

For more information on Don Bosco, see: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bosco_(Bolzano)

Summer Drafts involves various migrant and civil society associations based in Bolzano. Every year a number of international guests, artists, activists, and theoreticians who work in a participatory way are invited to spend a period between 7-10 days to work in collaboration with one or more organizations around a set of issues that are identified through a common process, http://www.summerdrafts.org

Urban gardening is a way of caring for nature and communities. The reasons to start are as diverse as the people who have a passion for it. Gardening not only enables to grow and harvest own fruits and vegetables, it also brings individuals together to share knowledge, their products, tools, and work, and to enjoy. People involved in gardening often experience closer relationships to their surroundings when they grow, cook, and harvest their own food together. Growing food in the city gives back the responsibility for ground, nature, and production processes.

27/07/2010

learning about histories and establish new links

We were invited to visit the neighbors' garden, which belongs to one of the two remaining semirurale houses in Bolzano. Retired carabinieri maintain the building and keep a vegetable garden. Semirurale houses were built in the course of Mussolini's resettlement politics, which brought Italians from Southern provinces as workers to new factories in the German-speaking South Tyrol. The two storey detached houses with gardens offered the newly arrived a home at the edge of the city and the possibility to survive on growing their own food. The popular houses were torn down during the 1970s to give way to a denser city development. The semirurale house in Via Bari is planned to become a museum.

For informing about the urban garden, we replanted parts of the neighboring bar- and restaurant's terrace in an action during lunchtime with plants Gärtnerei - Floricoltura Silbernagl had donated. While Meike was planting, Erika distributed leaflets inviting the guests to visit and to join the urban garden, and the garden party on Sunday afternoon, July 11.

suggestion: establish friendly relationships to your neighbors for exchange and support.