Mobile Garden

In october 2009, for the festival Art in Odd Places in the city of New York, the artist Tattfo Tan created the work Mobile Garden.

The project involved groups of citizens, students and artists who walked down the city’s streets bringing wheeled objects – from baby buggies and shopping carts to old suitcases, from chairs to skateboards. What you could see above these objects were no babies, food or clothes, but every kind of plants and flowers. The intention of the artist was to place all little mobile gardens in particular spaces, pointed out previously with some signs (which said “Plant here!”).

The perfect locations for plants were pieces of land unused and neglected or out of sight corners. All the pointed spaces were collected in a map, distributed to people in the neighborhood.

The use of particular objects, usually found abandoned or lying along the streets (shopping cart, baby buggies) powers up the performance, involving a level of provocation and reevaluating classic symbols of poverty and urban decay.

By placing the plants in abandoned spaces, the artist wants to invite people to reflect upon unexplored possibilities of urban land use, particularly about the lack of parks and green public spaces.
The performance is going to be repeated in june, 5th 2010, in Staten Island (NY), for a Mobile Garden Expo, but in the meanwhile it inspired some other similar works: the artist Shannon Young, on february 2010, presented a project very close to mobile garden in the Umami, Food&Art Festival in New York city.

Talking about Mobile Garden, we’re not saying anything particularly innovative: the japanese architect Gen Yamamoto (NL Architects), during the ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam in 2008, conceived a sort of “forest” made by a hundred of shopping carts scattered around the city, in which he planted trees and plants. This way, he wanted people to interact with his installation and “adopt” a tree, to make the city greener.
Other examples could be find in the Green Island workshop, developed every year in Milan in correspondence with the famous Design Expo Salone del Mobile. In the 2009 edition the work Bike Cart and Portable Garden was presented, which totally reflected the Mobile Garden of Tattfo Tan, moving little gardens above bikes an mobile containers.
More than this, in 1994, Lois & Franziska Weinberger, a couple of austrian artists, created Portable Garden putting plants and flowers inside little bags or different containers. The past is a good teacher.

All images taken from http://www.tattfoo.com/projects.html