ELINE DE CLERCQ: lesbian garden

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Gesamthof, a trans & lesbian garden 2019 - 2025

2025 is the last year for Gesamthof. We knew this location was temporary before we started to garden and it was still worth it, but now the time has come to end this beautiful garden. With the support of MORPHO and Extra City kunsthal we invite the LGBTQIA+ community to relocate plants to your own gardens.

The trans & lesbian garden in 2024

We see this as an opportunity to get together and garden. The trans & lesbian garden is a home to minorities: plants and insects that are part of the ecology of Borgerhout. During the queer gardening Sundays the wild plants growing in Gesamthof will be taken out of the garden, and shared for a better future. This way the garden can live on in many other gardens.

Queer gardening Sundays:

January 26: winter is ideal to move trees and shrubs: Hawthorn, Dog roses, Ferns, Beech, Rowan...

February 23: some of the trees and shrubs can go, and we can start to dig up early flowers: Snowdrops, Hellebore, Violets, wild garlic, forget-me-not... early winter flowering plants.

March 30: lots of spring flowers will have appeared by now, little Dog violets, lesser Celandine, Crocus, and also early summer flowers appear above ground: Salomon's seal, broad-leaved enchanter's nightshade, Clematis old man's beard, Alchemilla Xantochlora, Paris, Anchusa, Comfry...

April 27: summer plants are not yet flowering, let's move them into new gardens: Galium verum, ragwort, Digitalis, Libertia, Schizostylis coccinea, Thalictrum, and the little pools with waterplants, snails and dragonfly offspring. (in a way we're lucky there are no frogs or newts living in this garden)

May 25: the summer plants are ready to go now, during summer it is too hot and not ideal to move plants. We take a summer break to return in autumn.

September 21: late summer, the very last plants, who have not found a new home by now, can be potted up and given away.

October 26: this Sunday gardening is open for everyone: queer & non-queers, friends, family, neighbours, kin, join us for the last gardening Sunday at the Gesamthof. The remaining plants, the last shrubs and trees that still remain, all will be given away. Also left over garden bits and bobs, garden materials, reusable labels, pieces of string, a lucky charm, a souvenir... everything can go. At 15h we have a small garden tour and from 16 - 18h we invite you to the Homesick Tea Gathering. Please make a reservation if you'd like to join the tea event. Guest artists to be announced.

The Gesamthof in autumn 2024

Practical:

Entrance is via Extra City, Provinciestraat 112, 2018 Antwerp https://extracitykunsthal.org/

Queer gardening sessions are from 14 - 18h

There is a garden tour at 15h (about 45 minutes) to highlight the plants growing in this season.

The garden, plants and tour are free, and entrance is free via kunsthal Extra City. Please mention you'd like to go to the garden at the entrance of kunsthal Extra City.

Nice to know: Extra City organizes a guided tour (for queers and non-queers) on the last Sunday of the month at 14h and you can combine the tours.

When the bar at kunsthal Extra city is closed, tea is provided at the gardening table.

Unfortunately the garden is only accessible via a small staircase (6 steps) and not wheelchair friendly.

We'll garden in all kinds of weather.

Contact: for more information please contact me at elinewoolpublishing (at) gmail.com

This program is made with the generous support by Morpho who selected me for a research residency with this garden project. I would like to thank everyone who is helping to make this happen.

The Gesamthof garden has a contemporary gardener's approach to inclusive language: we use porous words, open semantics like patches and rhizomes, we like to communicate collective practices, and our definitions have frayed edges. Nature's playful approach to gender and sexuality is reflected in our language and practices.

This garden supports minorities, both plants and animals, including humans. This project started as Gesamthof, evolved to lesbian garden and includes trans people with a warm welcome. The words are highlighting practices, not exluding others. In reality we welcome all kinds of species, and use gardening to practice decolonial thinking.

With decolonialism we express 'to give back the land to whom belongs with this land' in ecology this includes a wide variety of species. It also requests good care & response-ability towards nature and land practices.

Some photos of the species who are looking to relocate:

Not all the plants are wild, this is a hybrid Epidemium.

The wild plants like some in this photo, are extremely valuable for wild life, interacting with butterflies, caterpillars, moths, bats, birds etc. This garden needs almost no care, wild plants can look after themselves, all year round.

Garlic mustard, here gray at the end of the season, is a larvae food plant for some very nice butterflies, it will self seed throughout the garden at the edge of hedges.

The Scrophularia auriculata or shoreline figwort, is in symbiosis with wasps and when this plant grows in your garden the attracted wasps will keep the aphid population under control.

Some of the plants are extremely poisonous for human animals, if you have children who would put plants in their mouth you might want to check before bringing these to your garden.

Some plants, like this wild garlic (daslook) are edible and will give you something exciting to taste.

Our plants come from lots of different places, if we still have the label you can take it with you.

We'll also help to determine what kind of soil type / light preferences might work.

Some of the plants in the garden arrived on their own, they are loved and cared for just as for the others, because they are living within the local ecology and support many species.

Some of the plants are very old, like this 20 year old fern who has moved from studio to studio with me, and now is no longer willing to be grown in a pot any more.

The intricate connections between the plants make this garden unique, but new connections can be made, and we hope this garden will live on, beloved by the queer community & friends.

Glean magazine

An long meandering talk with Els Roelandt fitted between the pages of Glean.


Detail with works by Yoko Enoki, Anat Maratkovich and me. Photo by Lieve Kleenen for GLEAN magazine, 2024.

A love for gardens seems to bring people together - even if our gardens are very different, and the same can be said of books, food and art. Perhaps art is unlike the other glues in our social structure, it seems Art with a capital A is elevated to a pedestal, and with all respect and wonder, that's not how I look at art. I'm glad to have met Els who also harbours a plurality of perspectives in her concept of art. Stepping down from artificial heights onto the ground, into the garden and down a tiny path made from old concrete stepping stones, this conversation with Els went to the tangible and earthly reality. It's where art meets the other, the animals, the critters, plants, fungi, and more.

Photo by Lieve Kleenen for GLEAN magazine, 2024

Detail from the text in GLEAN

Photo by Lieve Kleenen for GLEAN magazine, 2024

We met on a rainy day, with Lieve Kleeven taking beautiful photos while we talked over tea. Els Roelandt is passionate about lots of things I also care about, and it was a very nice conversation where I could easily forget that this was more than a casual meeting of friends. We talked about the importance of seeing the whole picture about the genocide and ecocide going on in Palestine, how the people and the land and the trees and the flowers all belong together. We talked bout what it was like to study in the nineties and how a young artist at the time had no support to set up a carreer. We talked about a book festival in the garden, and queer icons, about so much and yet it didn't feel as if the conversation was finished. The real talk was too long for the text between the pages of Glean Magazine, and I'm sad to say not everything I wanted to share could fit in there. But that's normal. While choosing what should stay and what could go - we decided to focus on painting & ecology - a decision we made because my paintings are not often shown in public and I am glad to share them in GLEAN. It was a nice choice, especially because my work is about LGBTQIA+ themes and this requires the right background information.

But ... a mistake was made. In the text it seems as if Extra City and Morpho arrived late to the garden, and that is not true. Morpho vzw is new and at the time this organization went under a different name: Studio Start. This organization took up the responsibility to convert the monastery in Ploegstraat into studios for artists, in 2016. Studio Start was joined by the local artists' residency organization and renamed AAIR and later joined by Extra City, in 2020. Together they create a complex and multifunctional area for artists to be present in the city, to have a workspace, to show work, to create events, to perform, to meet other artists etc. The people working behind the scenes of Morpho vzw took up the important task to improve their role in how we want to see the art field. As a studio occupant I could feel the changes directly, I could see the diversity in the arts within the building and reflected in their program. This is really important. Art is not something falling out of the sky, it is made from the ground up by people who have a choice, and what we see in the art world is the result of many people deciding to use their voice in a certain way. Morpho has been doing a great job in providing below the market price art spaces to all kinds of artists and I cannot imagine an art scene in Antwerp without the artists being present within the city boundaries.

But aside this mistake, I am incredibly glad to be given this opportunity, and I would like to thank Els and Lieve for this experience and for supporting my work. The magazine covers lots of interesting art and they make a difference in how we like to look at contemporary issues around us. Thank you so much for inviting me in and sharing my paintings and garden practices.

Photo Chantal Akerman, Collections Cinematek & Chantal Akerman Foundation, © Jane Stein

Interview by Els Roelandt

Photos in the photos: Lieve Kleenen

Part of GLEAN 5, May issue, this talk is published in Dutch

https://archief.glean.art

https://morphoantwerp.be

Hedera, a magazine on ecosexuality, transfeminism and queer ecology.

Hedera is commonly known as ivy, the forgotten names include bindwood and lovestone, as they like to cling to stone walls. There are a lot of misconceptions about this plant, it has been accused of damaging walls and 'being invasive'. This is not very nice gossip by people who don't really know what ivy does and how they grow. In reality, this plant - within their natural habitat - is a very important source of nectar in winter and they are key for the survival of early wild bees. Birds like to eat the berries and make nests in the dense cover of the leaves. All of this to say that we really like the name of the new magazine launched last autumn: Hedera.

This new magazine offers a platform to talk and think about postnatural and transfeminist studies, in essays, fiction, poetry and other forms of conversations observations are shared. The Gesamthof, a lesbian garden is featured in this first issue, you will find the recipe and atlas printed with a beautiful design on the pages between articles on queer feminism.

We would like to thank Zoë De Luca Legge for reaching out to us and including our texts and images, by printing about the Gesamthof we have more evidence that we exist. With Hedera our garden is shared in a different kind of overspill, these are seeds of thoughts. It matters so much because this existence is temporary. Like so many queer projects, the lesbian garden will also disappear when the new owners of the location move in. Queer archiving is incredibly important because equal rights are an ongoing effort, these rights are precarious and need positive energy rooted in generations of activism. Every plant, critter, slug, fungus and other species matters in this more-than-human perspective on a lesbian garden. With Hedera we are entangled in the stories of others, printed on paper, touched by the green fingers of many writers and readers, and greeted by all our antennae and other feelers. Thank you so much!

Hedera is curated and edited by Zoë De Luca legge, graphic design is by Paola Bombelli, translations and proofreading by Iris Legge, with contributions by Nicky Broeckhuysen, Seba Calfuqueo, Teresa Castro, Marina Cavadini, Eline De Clercq, Zoë De Luca Legge, Alice Fiorelli, Stefanie Hessler, Signe Johannessen, Michael Marder, Pony Express, Pia Riverola, Sacred Sadism, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, Caitlin Stobie, Cecilia Vacuña. The cover image is by Marina Cavadini, photo by Marina Cavadini and Brando Pizzon, 2019. Printed on recylced paper 'Cocoon Silk'.

Contact: info@hederamagazine.com

IG @hederazine

Gesamthof, the lesbian garden, can be visited via the kunsthal Extra City, in Antwerp. https://extracitykunsthal.org/

The garden is part of the monastery garden in the care of Morpho vzw, an organization providing ateliers for artists and organising artistic residencies. https://morphoantwerp.be/

The garden is cared for by many human and other species, the support for this art-nature project comes from many entanglements both within the monastery site and local and far-from-local generous friends.

Premiere Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden

On 30 July 2022 Anne Reijniers and me screened our short film Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden at Morpho in Antwerp. For this event we organized an exhibition by the poet and writer Johanna M Pas, her work brings gender, nature, ecology and being wild together in her poetry. A pop-up stand of LGBTQI+ bookstand Kartonnen Dozen offered feminist literature related to the art nature project Gesamthof, the lesbian garden in the same location.

We would like to thank everyone who helped to make this empowering and caring event, a big thank you to the wonderful public who came the create a very diverse community for the evening and thank you Johanna M Pas, Terre & Sym, Morpho, Extra City and The Sore Spot Singers.

If new screenings are planned, they will be announced on this website. A very warm thank you from both Anne Reijniers and me.

Photo by Miles Fischer, Anne Reijniers and me at the projection on the wall in the cinema by Morpho

Setting up the cinema at Morpho, it turned out the option to add more chairs was a good idea.

The exhibition with poetry by Johanna M Pas in the beautiful old refter of the monastery.

The poem by Johanna M Pas is also translated by her.

Johanna M Pas writes about gender, identity, nature, ecology and feeling home.

Terre organised the pop-up bookstand by Kartonnen Dozen, the oldest lgbtqi+ bookshop in belgium.

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

Film still from 'Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden 2022 on being useful.

Film still from 'Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden 2022 on how to begin.

Film still from 'Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden 2022 how to find plants.

Film still from 'Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden 2022 on new names for old plants.

Film still from 'Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden 2022 on the archeology of the soil.

Film still from 'Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden 2022

View on the lesbian garden from the studio by Eline De Clercq

Artemisia

We might think of gardening as a romantic past-time. Yet, gardening has been an important tool for colonialism and possession, but also emancipation. Eline De Clercq (°1979, BE) created a lesbian Gesamthof in the monastery garden of Kunsthal Extra City and Morpho. As plants are non-binary, the garden is a safe space for lesbians. She brings together a community of humans and non-humans to work together with care for their ecology. For this exhibition, Eline selected accessible medicinal plants from the garden to reveal class issues in an intersectional context. Medical care in most countries is still reserved for those who can afford it. This selection of plants thrive everywhere and are freely available in the wild, even in urban areas. Historically, they are used to heal female or othered bodies. Eline's curation culminates in the presence of Artemisia, which grows all over the globe and is used against illnesses like malaria. In some cultures, it is known to cure hormonal imbalance and induce natural abortions, but when doses incorrectly it is deadly poisonous. The plant is an illustration of the dangers female bodies go trough as a result of inequality and sexism, but also becomes a symbol of freedom. With the growing world-wide criminalisation of abortion and the endangered Roe vs. Wade court rule in the US today, Artemisia might even be a symbol for the fight for self-determination and equal rights in the 21st century.

Text by Zeynep Kubat

Artemisia is an installation of plants and fabrics in Sugar for the Pill: plants from the lesbian Gesamthof, 2022. Artemisia Vulgaris, Salvia Officinalis, Mentha Citrata. Wool fabric on a cotton rope with a depiction of the goddess Artimisia on one side and the leaf of the Artemisia plant on the other side in oil paint. Cotton fabric on the wall with text informing about the plant, the use, the religion and other abortifacient plants, with a danger warning all written in oil paint.

Sugar for the Pill is a group exhibition curated by Zeynep Kubat and my work was shown alongside the works of artists Margaux Schwarz, Laurie Charles, Chantal van Rijt, Lysandre Begijn, Saddie Choua, Aurélie Bayad, Carole Mousset, Lisa Ijeoma, Pélagie Gbaguidi.