A review before leaving

MEMORY GARDENS AUTISTIC GARDEN


AIMS

1. To provide an on-going habitat that integrates many movements.

2. To allow a place of return so that the changing tempo of some of these cycles of movement can be known and influenced by the actions and sensibility of all visitors and participants.

3. To put central to an environment the agents- human, animal and vegetable- that makes that environment.

4. To allow some of the human agents-autistic members and those with a history of mental health issues- to be central to this process of gradual change and modification so that they instigate the process through:

a) Aesthetic practices- making group sculptures that are situated and changed over time in varying locations in the garden. Making group paintings on large pieces of soaked calico cloth.

b) Gardening practices- pruning back, planting, watering and composting as a process of continued renewal.

c) Through movements, gestures, pauses either directly connected to the practices above or as a domestic immersion into an outdoor space in the tempo of going from one place to another, noticing things, stopping and then continuing.

In this manner to open up and fine-tune a sensitivity to sounds, forms, rhythms and a play of light and shadow that become useful through a continued involvement over time with the gestures and movements of others.

To use all these practices as methods of activation and rest in order to create a context for social living.

1. To operate this social context through either doing things or choosing at any time not to do things and to create platforms of rest between events that are important because they are familiar and repeated. That could involve sitting in chairs, drinking tea or walking quietly in the garden.

2. In this way to create a liveable domestic and creative environment that is held together by a combination of verbal and non-verbal episodes, of “Social” and “Non-social” moments as supportive of one another in making a viable living-space.
3. In this manner to work in an ecological way both with the place we find ourselves in and with the rhythms of immersion and separation through which autistic people maintain an on-going contribution whether at any one instance that is in a practice that seems to be “Social” or “Autistic”.

4. To use this practice of living environments as a way to ask questions about integration by building up such environments through sharing, enlarging and transforming the personal practices of a diverse range of people. To create through this an attention of responsiveness to all gesture, movement and position.

5. Therefore rather than implementing a functional model of what is appropriate and instructing those who do not fit in how to modify behaviour, to allow actions to influence one another in a fluid and non-goal orientated way.

6. In this way to encourage a fundamental acceptance of different styles of learning, experiencing and sensing by making these practices open to everyone as part of a contribution to a changing whole.

7. In this way to accept difference and so to include one another as an aspect of life.


End.


Memory Gardens Autistic Project
Legard Road, N5, Highbury and Islington
London


2001-2009



*With thanks to Action for Children on whose land this project became possible.