little Babylon - Tahi Moore

A group of artists interested in an old rooftop garden each began with the hope of including this garden within their individual projects. The hopes, the garden and the people have come together, and now co-exist under the title of Little Babylon.

Little: referring to the size of the project; being in reference to movements, perhaps to a time of love and certainly organic progress. Babylon is a garden in the desert. Its power lies in the fact of its having existed, or even its existence in the imagination. Envisage Babylon adding those who hear about it to the collective organism of the garden. Little Babylon dreams, if it dreams, of some functional whole. This might be societies, even micro-groups or functioning organic systems: of people who act; of plants who are; of interactions, of relationships; a progression of learning, of co-operative support, a supportive whole.

For the past few months, the people of Little Babylon have been gardeners. In response, the plants of Little Babylon have been shifting from the project of survival to the preparation for - some of us are anticipating - a journey, through the secret life of plants .¹ The plants and the people are forming into a new, functioning garden. Functioning: there are some specific projects in mind here; the garden, the garden in relation to the people who would be its peers, the garden as a site for artworks, and the garden and its relations as an artwork.

In the first part, the garden, in forming the Little Babylon Committee, exerts itself as a member of a peerless organism. In the second part each person within the whole no longer functions as an individual, or does not remain so, if they ever did. The functioning categories of the group are now its interactions; there are relationships and then bullshit .²

In the third part, the germinal projects of the site also seem to be members of the group. Little Babylon tells me that plants speak to us, that they exert a significant degree of influence upon us and that there is generative, conscious information shared with them; that if we would receive it, it would be freely given. Since the consciousness of plants would be different to that of ourselves, as we are, there needs to be some kind of translation from plant minds to human minds. I am guessing that the artworks that are anticipated for the space of Little Babylon's roof garden are aerials for the transmissions from the plants to us. Further, I suspect and hope that central to these transmissions are the inter-relationships, whose presence seems to be necessitated by the approach of the whole project. When within these relationships, it might be possible, even necessary, to abandon some of our struggles, the first being that of hierarchies. When the individual goes, the group as a collection of individuals also ceases to be. And before someone goes and writes some story about what might replace that or what the relationships linking individuals would become, some of us might get to hear what the plants are saying.

^1. The Secret Life of Plants, Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins, 1973: Influential Book for Little Babylon. Journey through the secret life of plants: from the title of Stevie Wonder's apparently last artistically ambitious album, undoubtedly made after he read The Secret Life of Plants.
^2. "There are relationships and then bullshit": quoted from my father.

Simon Esling Untitled2005