In collaboration with Tim Young and the Solitary Garden, we are currently working on creating and conceptualizing a dye garden that will be used to teach about abolition, collective liberation, dyeing, and land use history.

 

The Freedom Garden – sees plants as comrades in abolition. That is, our garden is a place for teaching and learning knowledge of natural dye processes that builds ways of being in relation with land and each other that is both a refusal of the carceral state, and insistence on a vibrant collective Freedom that we propagate and grow ourselves. We see the freedom of land, the freedom of all those imprisoned by the state, and collective liberation as intrinsically linked. We turn to plants as teachers in memorializing those lost to the violent, carceral, genocidal state, and teachers in finding alternate worlds and freedoms embedded within the cracks of the present. Our garden intends to be a space of abolitionist possibility in the homogenizing context of the University. Freedom Garden is a sister project of sorts to the already-planted Solitary Garden, a project by artist jackie sumell in collaboration with Tim Young and UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Arts and Sciences (IAS).