GRAFT: A Soil Based Syllabus
2018
A collaborative project between Owen, 14-18 Now and National Waterfront Museum, GRAFT: A Soil Based Syllabus works with local communities, schools and adult learners to grow food and explore making through an alternative curriculum.
GRAFT: A Soil Based Syllabus is a garden and workshop, developed in 2018, and which has since been working to create a new system of practical pedagogy which connects food, sustainable development and the creation of green infrastructure in the centre of Swansea. The garden provides a place for people to grow and cook food, and to work collaboratively and learn collectively. GRAFT is a sustainable, organic growing environment, creating an edible landscape to encourage participation and conversation, producing vegetables, fruits and herbs that are donated to many groups throughout the area who provide food for those in need such as Matthew’s House, Ogof Adullam and the Swansea Asylum Seekers Support drop in centre.
The garden is a social and educational resource within a museum, and volunteers are invited to join an intergenerational curriculum of outdoor learning and making connected to food. All of the garden’s infrastructure has been built by the team and participants. In turn, the museum provides participants with accreditation, training and support to explore new skills through the project. Activities include growing food, harvesting and preserving seeds, making seed bombs, beekeeping, clay oven building and cooking.
The aim of GRAFT is to develop long term green infrastructure within the city, and to exist as a useful community resource long after the project’s initial two year development. In working within the grounds of the museum, Graft aims to influence the ways in which collaboration and co-production might occur within institutions, and how they might take climate and community seriously. In a time of global climate crisis, GRAFT seeks to form practical connections between issues around climate, food production, sovereignty and poverty. In all of its work, it recognises its collaborators and others doing this work, including local Community Supported Agriculture projects and local community food initiatives, and organisations such as La Via Campesina, the Land Workers Alliance. GRAFT’s key goal is to explore the museum as a useful community resource, and how it can support its local constituents.
GRAFT has influenced the culture of National Museum Wales who are now exploring the possibilities of similar land-based community gardens at all of their 7 sites. The project has also impacted on how the museum accesses the collection, making connections between the processes of the garden and the museum’s focus on industrial heritage, exploring links to capitalism, land use, labour and colonisation.