To people who have gardens, I give my thanks to you.
—Roland Hayes, 1954.
Liberation Gardens is an ongoing research project that studies liberation as a spatial practice. Developed through fieldwork, archival research, drawing, and collage, the project traces how gardens, domestic landscapes, cultivated terrains, and acts of tending have historically functioned as spaces of emancipatory imagination across the global majority and its diasporas. The project builds upon architect and theorist Mario Gooden’s proposition that “liberation is a spatial practice,” an ongoing process involving acts of occupation, refusal, and collective worldmaking, rather than discrete ideological or political end goals.1 It therefore asks what kinds of spatialities emerge under conditions of violence, dispossession, colonialism, apartheid, and extraction, and how oppressed peoples have historically produced spaces of autonomy within and against those structures.
The chronogram develops through the figure of the garden. Not as an ornament, but a site of survival, relation, fugitivity, and cultural production. The project draws particularly from Édouard Glissant’s notion of the “creole garden”: The rhizomatic spaces cultivated by enslaved peoples within and against the plantation system in the Caribbean and the larger Black Atlantic.2 The Creole garden functioned simultaneously as a space for sustenance, healing, spirituality, cultural invention, and dialogue. Resisting the rigid monoculture of the plantation, it embodied multiplicity, opacity, and interdependence.
Liberation Gardens interprets the chronogram through a similar logic: rather than a linear historical timeline organized around empire, statehood, or canonical architecture, it represents a map of relations where people, ideas, struggles, and geographies remain entangled across time. Figures such as Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Robert Sobukwe, Josephine Baker, Frantz Fanon, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, and Sylvia Wynter emerge not only as political or intellectual actors, but as cultivators of worlds. Through practices of writing, homemaking, correspondence, gardening, teaching, and care, they produced alternative spatial imaginaries where political struggle and domestic or ecological life are intimately bound together.
The chronogram is informed by fieldwork and situated practice in Serowe, Cape Town, Steinkopf, Dakar, São Paulo, London, Liverpool, and Martinique. Across these geographies, the garden repeatedly appears as an architecture of being, survival, and imagination. Investigations into Bessie Head’s home and pastoral lifestyle in Serowe, for instance, demonstrate the necessity for resistance to be integrated into the physical and social landscapes of everyday life, transforming space from a tool of constraint into a medium of freedom. In a similar light, our project Hophuis: A Site of Dance and Solidarity (2025), around the Steinkopf Community Centre—a derelict public facility built on the site of a community garden—highlights the capacity for spaces neglected by institutions to evolve into “home grounds” for insurgent social and cultural relations.3 In these ways, Liberation Gardens also reconsiders the relationship between architecture and domesticity, with gardening rendered as a kind of architectural labor: a continuous shaping of land, climate, memory, and social life. Equally, domestic practices historically marginalized within dominant architectural discourse are deemed central acts of liberation.
Accompanying the chronogram is an evolving mixtape which extends the project into the world of sound. The sequence begins with “To People Who Have Gardens” by Roland Hayes (1954), paying tribute to diverse gardeners and gardens, and establishing the conceptual terrain of the project. The second track, “Earth’s Creation” by Stevie Wonder, drawn from his soundtrack to The Secret Life of Plants (1978), situates gardens and landscapes as living worlds with their own agency, intelligence, and memory, and invokes the primordial Garden of Eden. The mixtape also mirrors the chronogram’s nonlinear structure, assembling a poetics of relation between Caribbean rhythms, Black experimental music, spoken word, fusion, and devotional song. Many of the songs meditate on rivers, forests, rain, seasons, and gardens, foregrounding ecology as inseparable from political freedom, while others dwell on repair, mourning, refusal, and joy under conditions of oppression.
Liberation Gardens proposes the garden as both method and metaphor. It is a way of organizing history through relation rather than hierarchy, through rooting and cross-pollination rather than fragmentation. The chronogram functions as an archive, an incomplete ecology of liberation struggles.
Liberation Gardens Mixtape Tracklist
- Roland Hayes, "To People Who Have Gardens," 1954.
- Stevie Wonder, "Earth's Creation," 1979.
- Francis Bebey, "Forest Nativity," ca. 1982-84.
- Meshell Ndegeocello, "Plantation Lullabies," 1993.
- Matana Roberts, "How Much Would You Cost?" 2011.
- Lonnie Holley, "The Start of a River's Run (One Drop)," 2013.
- Camille Soprann Hildevert, "Soprann aux Antilles," 1988.
- IG Culture, "B Free," 2008.
- Pamela Smaiha Wise, "Marcus Garvey," 2015.
- Alain Goraguer, "Terr et Tiwa," 1973.
- Diggs Duke, "Seasons," 2023.
- Nina Simone, "Isn't It a Pity," 1972.
- The Roots featuring Amiri Baraka, "Something In the Way of Things (In Town)," 2002.
- Herbie Hancock, "Rain Dance," 1973.
- Pharoah Sanders, "Harvest Time," 1977.
Liberation Gardens Reading List
- Abrahams, Yvette. “Colonialism, Dysfunction and Disjuncture: The Historiography of Sarah Bartmann.” PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2000.
- Baker, Josephine. Fearless and Free: A Memoir. London: Vintage Classics, 2025.
- Berger, John. “Garden On My Cheek.” In Here Is Where We Meet. London: Bloomsbury, 2005.
- Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. London: Bowerdean Press, 1978.
- Blouin, Andrée. My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983.
- Césaire, Aimé, Suzanne Césaire, and René Ménil. Tropiques, 1941–1945: Collection complète. Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1978.