VIDEOS
I think I knew on an intuitive level that video would ultimately become a medium James and I would turn to. Coronavirus then pushed that inkling over the edge and into reality. James has been making videos highlighting current and past workshops, while I have been translating my landscape work and ideas over the past 15 years into four-minute shorts - videos James describes as "landscape comedies." The underlying impetus behind each of our sets of videos is the desire to reach broader, more diverse audiences, to spark curiosity and wonder about both cities and the natural world.
In my case, I am so keenly aware of how the landscape world has a real diversity problem. You could chalk it up to a staggeringly expensive design education (a formal landscape education I forewent for that very reason) coupled with, upon graduation, landscape jobs that are very low-paying - where they even exist at all. No doubt these elusive, less-than-lucrative positions reflect an era in which horticultural knowledge is hugely undervalued and in which our economy is unable to capture the intrinsic value of nature and natural systems. But it's more than this. It also stems from a profession that increasingly feels like it is made up of professionals only talking to each other and all saying similar things, all the while our country becomes ever more diverse and comprised of populations who relate to nature in oftentimes differing and layered ways.
Writes James Hitchmough, author of Sowing Beauty, on a growing insistence amongst landscape professionals of the use of only native plants despite the potentially limited appeal of this approach amongst diverse audiences: "We know from research that [Bangladeshis in East London] and many other primarily urban-based ethnic groups are less well represented in visits to the countryside, and that notions of identity in these urban-based cultures are not strongly formed by romantic notions about... native landscapes. The tendency is to believe that these notions should be instilled through education, but this is surely just cultural hegemony that is out of kilter with the realities of migration and the future of the global city."
It's an observation that squares with our own work with diverse audiences across the country. Indeed, both James (Rojas) and I understand even more how the entry point to exploring nature, and exploring cities and urban planning, should be curiosity and joy, not a set of rules. Let folks explore, make mistakes, grow, and create meaning in the ways that are personal and exciting to them.
Anyway, enough talk. On to the videos.
To watch John's videos, you can click HERE.
To watch James's, you can click HERE.
-John