Ejaradini is a multi-sited art project that builds and grows gardens in the courtyards of South African museums. The gardens serve as sites of exploration of the potential of black gardening and its histories, as a way to rethink museums. Black gardening, as an existing practice of refiguring a colonial inheritance, offers us ways to think through how we might reimagine our relationships to inherited colonial infrastructures more broadly.

The first iteration of Ejaradini was an 18-month project that sought to understand, practise and model the socialities of urban black gardening. In so doing, it took up residence at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) in 2018 and the Wits University Anthropology Museum in 2019, as both a garden installation and a series of social engagements, experiences and happenings. Ejaradini thus unearthed the political potential that emerges in the social experiences and connections offered by urban black gardening.

Select engagements and conversations with people we have met through the research and production process form our focus. In this way, the depth of social practice that emerges through the everyday practice of growing, as well as communal ties, becomes evident. The application of the socialities of urban black gardening practice connects to a wider spectrum of discourse, unlocking potential for institutions. These parallel lines of enquiry – the one conversational and descriptive, the other discursive – bring together a deeply affective experiential positionality, on the one hand, and a critique orientated towards modelling that selfsame affect and experience on the other. These two aspects are intended to be read simultaneously, and the reader will find references to various elements that cut across both.

MAM’ SUSAN

Mam’ Susan grows chomolia, pumpkin, mielies, sweet potato and sugar cane, as well as lilies and marigolds. Her main garden, on the street outside her home, is approximately a metre wide and two metres across. It is enclosed with a high fence to protect it. She is forced to garden on the pavement largely because the plot that her house is on is tiny, and any spare space in the yard has been filled with back rooms. When we come to meet her, entering through the back door, she is sitting in her dark kitchen-cum-spaza shop, next to the old Welcome Dover stove. She is softly spoken, and funny.