Rooting in Exile

Migrating from East Anatolia to Greece during the 1923 Greek and Turkish population exchange, artist Eleana Antonaki’s family relocated multiple times en route to their refugee settlement on the east coast of Greece. Each time they stopped along their journey, they planted flora, most often Yucca trees, Persian silk trees, and Bougainvillea. Though they knew they would not see the growth of the plants through, the gesture of planting maintained a form of agrarian familial knowledge despite no longer being "home.” This tradition was passed down generationally, and as a result Antonaki grew up around the same flora as her great-grandparents. This fact exceeds nostalgia, as Antonaki notes that the act of planting was indexical to—or an extension of—her family’s experience migrating; planting was a part of relocation, and the plants themselves became imbued with familiarity and a sense of home. At the same time, they carry family narratives and generational trauma.  

As a result of governance like forced population exchange, families experience the material effects of these decisions in their daily lives. We have long known that the imperial division of people based on singular, identity-based factors contradicts the material conditions of life, which are tangled, messy, and malleable. Those who experience politically-motivated migration do not snap into new spaces like puzzle pieces. Their traditions, joys, and traumas leave trails in their paths and manifest uniquely into their new homes. In turn, their absence haunts the spaces they once inhabited. Like gardens, roots remain in the soil, seeds can be transported, and new plants grow on top of, and with, those that were there before.  

Antonaki’s series of paintings entitled Uncanny Gardening depicts fictional fragments, found or excavated: a Greek newspaper clipping, a clay shard with a partial portrait, a Polaroid photograph, and a Yucca plant. They also include two books entitled Uncanny Gardening: A Complete Handbook to planting Yucca trees, Persian silk trees, and Bougainvillea and How to vanish into the sea with instructions. The artist’s practice is underpinned by a critique of Western knowledge systems, specifically their desire to control all aspects of natural life. The former title presumably represents a book related to the planting traditions of Antonaki’s family. Is relocation part of this instruction manual? Or is it strictly about the act of planting? Are those gestures separate, any longer? There is no answer, as the book is fictional, but the artist here inserts some humour, suggesting that even her family’s traditions might be co-opted for the gain of others.  

By positioning her work from the perspectives of her ancestral, present-day, and future family, and referencing contemporary vernaculars of Greece, Antonaki draws an important distinction between institutions and lived experience. The act of gardening leaks outside the bounds of structures that dictate movement, and becomes a subaltern practice of survival. This is particularly poignant in a place like Greece where the lives of citizens are generally far removed from the ruins of antiquity and island tourism they are known for. Antonaki draws attention to the stabilizing nature of gardening, or creating home while in exile, and how this occurs as an unsanctioned practice not recognized under the umbrellas of “culture” or centralized governance. Significantly, practices like gardening survive political upheavals and migration over generations because of their connection with our everyday rhythms as humans.  

In 2018, ma ma—the curatorial collective I co-founded with Heather Canlas Rigg— collaborated with The Table, a project by the Toronto-based artist Brittany Shepherd. We invited a multidisciplinary group of individuals to share a meal with us, and discuss a recipe or food from which we inherited familial knowledge. Having come from diverse communities and diasporas, we engaged in a rich conversation about what we gained through this knowledge, what may have been lost in translation, and the challenges of being in contrast to local dominant culture. This contrast can often feel like it takes up our immediate space, due to the decentralized nature of collective memory, but as Antonaki notes, “we have a very distant relationship to collective memory, because it exceeds us generationally, but at the same time it’s very intimate.”11Eleana Antonaki Interview in A Big Heritage with a Glorious Past, ed. ma ma (Toronto: Critical Distance Centre for Curators, 2021), 15. It is perhaps this intimacy that supports the resilience of community, inherited knowledge, and familial gardening as gestures of stabilization and survival, as such practices require care, observation, and a gentle touch.  

The organization Ojibiikaan emphasizes that growing and eating the food of one’s ancestors is rooted in ceremony, storytelling, and honouring land, their beliefs underpinned by an emphasis on Indigenous food sovereignty. Meaning that growers should have agency over and access to land in order to grow traditional and ceremonial foods. In contrast to settler-colonial practices—which the horticulturalist Emma Lansdowne notes was designed to communicate power in a manner akin to a cabinet of curiosities: a “careful curation reflects an individual’s taste, values, and goals made possible by their sociopolitical context”22Emma Lansdowne, “Making and Unmaking Place: Revisiting the Colonial Legacy of a West Coast Garden Estate,” A Complete Guide to Seeds, Gardening, and Rootlessness, ed. ma ma (Toronto: ma ma, 2018), 28.—this perspective acknowledges the bodily relationships between living things, especially in cases of consumption, as something sacred. As the organization points out, there is a responsibility in gardening to nurture relationships with nature by using traditional growing and harvesting techniques that are rooted in understanding the land one is gardening on.33https://ojibiikaan.com/about-us/#mission-and-values. In a similar sentiment to Antonaki’s project, Ojibiikaan highlights that the repetition of practices over generations are not merely strategies of survival, but are also imbued with collective memory.  

In the GTA we are familiar with the importance of gardening to many diasporic communities for sustenance and survival, both physical and cultural. On a local level we might witness domestic gardening and its varied specificities, its environmental adaptations, and its usefulnesses, such as for food, medicine, ritual, and nostalgia. And as land becomes increasingly privatized, developed, and expensive, resulting in decreased accessibility, community gardens and projects—where they are possible—become spaces for refuge and growth. In addition to Ojibiikaan, there are numerous examples of community-run organizations and initiatives that create spaces for the resiliency of cultural knowledge, more than I can mention here. The Milky Way Garden in Parkdale is an apt example of how gathering together and access to space can sidestep and exceed the restraints of a city obsessed with development and profit. Milky Way is cooperatively owned and cared for by adult ESL students, largely from Tibet, who live in the high-rises nearby. This is a space that is protected by its privacy, and the fact that it is a land trust protected from development and profit-driven land use. It has nurtured the growth of newcomer communities through gardening, as well as maintaining and nourishing their collective memories, both oral and through the plants themselves. Practices like these recognize gardening as a stabilizing gesture, and one of survival, including and beyond direct nourishment.  

These few instances of organizing around gardening exemplify the strength in connecting our day-to-day rhythms with that of organic growth, where possible. I have often recalled a story my grandmother told me about her father, in which he was planting olive trees in their village in southern Greece after the civil war. A neighbour walked by and asked him why he was bothering to plant, when all the youth were leaving. My great-grandfather responded by saying that they will return when the city’s resources fold on themselves, and cannot sustain growing life. As political governance continues its moves to separate our bodies from ourselves—whether through lack of representation or limitations of individual rights—practices of community and nurturing will continue to decentralize to survive. And perhaps it is the very nature of being outside of centralized governance that has allowed for gardening and planting, and all the knowledge they produce, to survive.