Putting The Garden To Sleep
26 October – 6 November 2020
Dear strangers, allies, friends and affairies,
we warmly invite you for this year’s occasion of Putting The Garden To Sleep – a collective practice of care for the garden, in anticipation of the coming winter. For this period MASSIA offers free stay and food (much of which will have grown here).
We want you to join with us not just in bodily labor but also equally in questioning how we want to grow and re/produce – expanding the space of the garden to MASSIA as tool for self-organisation and our participation beyond.
The work with the garden is synonymous with practice-based studying, and all the enmeshments this figures between participating agents: vegetal, microbial, fungal, mineral, meteorological, human, ecological, economical, political, … put simply this could be the questioning of the entire endeavor of ‘gardens’ and ‘gardening’ (generally and particularly as a supposed practice of care), particular practices like ‘pulling weeds’, ‘saving’ seeds, not letting go to ‘waste’, notions of dis/continuities of (forms of) life that accompany nearly every interaction with non-human entities…
Concrete works in the garden include:
– preparing the garden for the cold season and the following spring
– soil and compost work (shoveling, feeding, mulching…)
– making strawberry straw beds and hugelcultures
– preparing tree guilds (attempting a food forest in the nordic climate)
– winter sowing and seed saving (and possibly creating seed libraries with the local community)
– There will be plenty of harvest and possibilities to process and preserve herbs and foods for us to eat, to preserve and to maintain the herb laboratory
The period will be marked by our situatedness inside cyclical time: de- and recompositions, death and the oncoming darkness, and a so-called blue moon on 31st October. If there is desire for ritual and celebration we can collectively imagine and organise this.
If you’d like to join us, please write an email to infomassia@gmail.com
All are welcome. You can stay for as long or short as you like, and it is possible to expand your stay once you are here. Despite free stay and food, you still need to become a member and pay 12 euro for the membership, valid for 12 months.
Apropros bodily capacities
Garden work is physically demanding. We propose around 5 hours of work per day. If this is too intense, you can also decide to take it slower and we negotiate the terms of exchange.
Apropros pandemic
The way we are currently dealing with the situation in MASSIA is to negotiate our behavior collectively and orient ourselves strictly by the needs and recommendations of the ones most concerned. The average number of residents at the moment is between 4-8 people sharing 1300 sqm indoors, and plenty of space outdoors. Currently we keep distance in communal spaces and wash hands often but don’t wear masks. The main precautions we emphasize are towards the outside of the compound, towards the local population here in Massiaru, the surroundings, and along the travel to Massiaru. We encourage you to wear masks and frequently disinfect hands while traveling, and whenever you enter enclosed spaces outside of MASSIA (eg when you go shopping). We reassess the situation whenever a new person arrives or a need for reassessment emerges.
Traveling at this time is complicated and we are aware that your booking won’t guarantee your presence. Be in touch if you have questions regarding traveling to Estonia.
Greetings from Massiaru!