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Tending is an experimental garden project in one of the courtyards at Sydney College of the Arts.
The project was initiated by Professor Ross Gibson, who hired Lucas Ihlein to "create a garden at Sydney College of the Arts and write a blog about the process".
Gardening began in July 2010. Bonetto and Ihlein spent one day per week on site, slowly watching as the garden evolved via our smallish interventions.
TENDING is not a community garden per se (with plots and allotments and such). Rather, it was conceived as a way of intervening lightly in the social and biological fabric of the college.
Chance interactions with university staff and students, and community members beyond Sydney College of the Arts, were documented on the TENDING blog.
Ihlein and Bonetto finished their tenure at TENDING in mid 2011. Others have since taken up the fork and spade, as the garden continues to wax and wane depending on available energy.
More info on TENDING
Project blog: http://tending.net.au
Alana Hunt, "A Garden Experiment", Realtime Magazine, June-July 2011.
Ross Gibson and Caleb Kelly, "Contemporary Art and the Noise of TENDING", Interference Journal of Audio Culture, 2013.
Kirsten Bradley, "Sydney's Best Kept Permaculture Secret", Milkwood Blog, September 4, 2011.
Spiros Panagirakis mentions TENDING as part of a discussion on pedagogy in art: "Teacher Teacher Teacher", UN Magazine, edition 6.2, November 2012, pp14-19.
Jennifer Mae Hamilton, "Gardening out of the Anthropocene: Creating Different Relations between Humans and Edible Plants in Sydney", in Covert plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an anthropocentric world. Brainstorm Books, 2018.