ELINE DE CLERCQ: Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden

Premiere short film (15', 2022)

Screening at MORPHO on 30 july at 21:30h, entrance via Extra City, Provinciestraat 112

Anne Reijniers & Eline De Clercq invite you to the premiere of their short film Gesamthof / A lesbian garden, an art - nature project in the monastery garden of Extra City and MORPHO. In this time document of the garden we follow a tour with Eline De Clercq and the MORPHO artists in residence. The garden provides an entry point to talk about diverse topics such as colonialism in botany, the ambiguity of naming, the social expectations of women and the search for a lesbian identity.

Anne Reijniers and Eline De Clercq are both artists and gardeners living in Antwerp. Anne Reijniers is part of the filmmakers collective 'Collectif Faire-Part' and participated in MORPHO's development residency in 2021. Eline De Clercq is a visual artist, painter and rents a studio at MORPHO in Ploegstraat since 2019 when she also started to work in the monastery garden.

The film shows the Gesamthof, a lesbian garden - including trans people - inspired by the books of Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jamaica Kincaid, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula Leguin and many other thinkers who are working on togetherness in the Plantationocene. The Gesamthof puts thoughts into tangible practice: Haraway's queer kinship, speculative fabulations, situated knowledge and Tsing's explanation of a complex patchy capitalism and the human aspect into the restoration of post-industrial land as well as being part of the ecology. In the garden we see how compost works, what soil can do and how a pine tree is a great pioneer. In the film we document the garden and our place in it along the garden path. The tours that are given in the garden activate the stories that are shared between the human and nonhuman inhabitants.

The temporary nature of the garden, the residents and the project, gives this short film an urgency. We don't know how long we can stay at this location, and climate change is happening now, both makes us feel like we have to keep working at a better understanding of what ecology means in a multilayered compost.

There is an entire page on the garden project, with old photos, new images and where you can read the garden recipe:

https://elinedc.blogspot.com/p/the-gesamthof.html

or follow on instagram for updates @wool_publishing