_the bustan care-plug-ins as hybrid gardens for a city of coexistence
The Bustans are collectively generated socio-ecological assemblages for a city of Coexistence!
The Bustan Cultivators represent hybrid Plug-Ins for a City of Coexistence, unfolding as citywide network of care plug-ins and catalysators for renewed socio-metabolic processes in Tel Aviv, creating active agency of caring and coexisting. After the pandemic is before the next pandemic! We need to learn how to being with, how to coexist with different lifeforms and how to interact and live within metabolic flows, that feed and surround us. The Bustan-Plug-Ins mirror this attitude as spatial assemblages of interwoven materials and processes. The Bustans are understood as speculative worldmaking practice, actively weaving materials, things, habitats, and processes into a socio-ecological meshwork that creates connectedness, collective responsibility and multiple habitats. A ritual of care and cultivation around the creation of the installations will be developed together with local actors, creating new spaces of interaction, care and radical coexistence for and with material flows and lifeforms. The Bustans (arab. orchard/garden) as hybrid infrastructures will redefine Tel Aviv as Garden City in the Anthropocene: as cyborg ecosystems the Plug-Ins will activate multiple situations in the city by a strategy of assembling and adaption. The Plug-Ins come in different appearances and functions, as they can fluctuate as acupunctures activating the cities multiple hidden niches, as garden clearings in courtyards or squares, or as shrine-like material meshwork, the Bustan Follies, which is further being developed as main proposal for the Kikar Magen David at the metabolic hub Shuk Ha Carmel. The Bustan Follies will be woven and generated around a simple base structure of wooden slats on an elevated wooden platform/planting bed (r:6m). Materials from the shuk, such as plastic, leaves, wood, metal or textiles will be knotted and interwoven in between the wooden slats by the different local users, formulating new rituals for dealing with material processes by an active caring practice. Multiple Add-Ons on the nodes of the different materials will hybridize the structure into a living animal machine by integrating nesting structures for bats, birds and bees. Different climbing plants will grow spontaneously out of the composting structure in the elevated platform, which is constantly being fed by organic waste from the market. Over time, a speculative and metabolically intertwined assemblage is evolving, creating a future fossil and hybrid care space for Tel Aviv!
