Ground force

‘A Little Patch of Ground’ is an inter-generational food-growing and performance project that has taken place over the last four years with communities and arts organisations in Liverpool, Doncaster, South Devon and East London. It will be taking place again this year in Plymouth. The project was born out of a shared desire by myself and my associate Anne-Marie Culhane to find a way to respond creatively to the challenge of climate change and resource depletion. In different venues and cities we have worked with a team of artists, food growers, venues and volunteers to create this project bringing people together to develop resilience and interconnection.

The projects run over a period of 20 weeks, during which a culturally diverse and inter-generational group of local residents meet weekly to grow their own permaculture-inspired vegetable garden and create a performance together about their relationship with the natural world. We spend up to three months before we begin to recruit participants. We do this by extensive visits to speak to community groups, relationship-building with public and voluntary sector workers so that they make personal referrals, and building ‘shopkeeper champions’ so that they promote the posters and flyers we leave in their shops.

Participants learn to explore the world as our shared home

It is a long process but having a genuinely diverse group of people, most of who have never experienced participating in the arts before, is hugely rewarding. I always ask my team how we can position ourselves so that we can be ‘easy to reach’ rather than expecting people to come to us and labelling them as ‘hard to reach’. I also always consider how we can offer more than one way in so that people with different skills, interests and abilities can find a place in the projects we offer.

The group cooks and eats together each week, and through a variety of
media, explores thoughts on food, resources, climate change, interdependence and sustainability. Participants learn to explore the world as our shared home, through the sharing of personal stories about moments of connection in nature and undertaking documentation and writing tasks about special places outdoors. Through creative writing, making and drama activities, the group takes a journey together, inspired by eco-philosopher Joanna Macy’s behaviour change cycle of ‘Gratitude, Despair, Seeing with new eyes, Going forth’. In the last weeks of the project these transformative personal experiences are woven together into a multimedia performance incorporating text, image, objects and movement that intimately reflect the shared stories, thoughts and ideas unearthed during the project.

The perfomance is then shared with family, friends and the more usual arts audience of the venue or organisation we are working with. Often the performances bring people into arts venues that have not been before.

Ruth Ben-Tovim is Creative Director of Encounters.
www.encounters-arts.org.uk