For seven years, I have cultivated and worked a plot at VTV Tuinderslust, an allotment garden in Rotterdam, alongside people I would not otherwise have met. Over time, the garden has transformed how I understand artistic production.

A garden is never produced by one person alone. It takes shape through shared work: preparing the soil, planting, watering, repairing paths and structures, exchanging seeds and knowledge, responding to weather, and maintaining how the shared space is used. The garden is shaped not only by the person tending a plot, but by other gardeners, plants, animals, materials and forces beyond our control.

The garden has become more than the subject of my work. It has become the condition through which the work is produced. Through working alongside others and paying attention to what happens between us, images, texts, objects and encounters emerge. Artistic production becomes a process of observation, adaptation and exchange—something made through a place and with others, rather than by the artist alone.

The garden exists in the condition of multiplicity. A plant’s growth, a change in weather, a gardener’s decision, a historical rule, an animal’s intervention and my own response all become part of the same situation.

VTV Tuinderslust is ninety-one years old, which means no one now living was present when its earliest rules were made. The association continues through a process of renewal: decisions are revised at each meeting by whoever holds a plot at that moment, allowing the structure to change while remaining recognisable as the same structure. The association is therefore made not only of rules, but of positions that people enter and temporarily inhabit.

The garden taught me to work within both of these conditions: a threshold no one can see, and a position built by people I never met. A photograph taken at the point of return. A drawing made before the outcome is understood. A conversation about where a hedge should end. These are forms made through the meeting between the garden’s ecological processes, its social histories and my actions within them.

This experience resonates with Daoist thought, particularly the writings of Zhuangzi, where understanding develops through embodied practice. The cook and the wheelwright do not separate knowledge from action; their expertise emerges through repeated engagement with a specific situation. Such knowledge is relational, situated and difficult to fully translate into abstract principles.

This perspective also shapes how I understand knowledge within ecological systems. While ecological discourse has challenged the separation between humans and nature, my practice approaches this relationship through particular people, materials and places. The gardeners of Tuinderslust are people whose relationships with the garden have accumulated through years of cultivation and care. Their involvement reveals how knowledge develops through sustained participation in a shared environment. Such knowledge is embedded in practice and inseparable from the conditions through which it emerges.

The garden existed long before I entered it and will continue afterwards. It cannot be designed, controlled or concluded by an artist. Artistic knowledge here emerges through inhabiting conditions together with others.