In Modern Nature, a volume of his journals written between 1989 and 1990, Derek Jarman’s narrativisation of the process of tending his garden eschews the romantic predilection for nature’s pristineness and focuses instead on the survival of herbs and flowers in a place where they should not thrive. The allegory is palpable here, for just as violets and daffodils and poppies bloom among the stones in the shadow of the nuclear plant which overlooks his cottage, Jarman and the marginalised communities he invokes in his work also demonstrate their struggle and their resilience in the face of the personal, cultural, and social crisis of Thatcherite Britain. In light of Jarman’s work, tending nature can be seen as an emergency praxis whose imperative opens onto a consideration of the relationships between time and community, human and other-than human life, inviting us to rethink the possibilities for worldmaking in times of crisis.

The legacy of Derek Jarman, especially his garden at Prospect Cottage, provides us with a variety of entry points through which we can think through questions of interspecies relationality and affective ecology. This programme brings together a wide variety of cinematic approaches that seek to understand and respond to these questions and inspire an ecopolitics accentuating pleasure, play or improvisation within and among species. A series of films that engage in and with practices of gardening, seeding, re/wilding or foraging, while challenging the dominant politics of extraction and extinction associated with the imperatives of perpetual growth and expansion. Film works that evoke the tangled and venturesome histories that we need to imagine in order to become again of and from the world — to sow worlds beyond oppressive boundaries and binarities. As Jarman noted in his diary: “There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.”

to whom it may concern
in the dead stones of a planet
no longer remembered as earth
may he decipher this opaque hieroglyph
perform an archaeology of soul
on these precious fragments
all that remains of our vanished days
here — at the sea’s edge
I have planted a stony garden
dragon tooth dolmen spring up
to defend the porch
steadfast warriors
Derek Jarman, 13 February 1989

With the support of the French Embassy in Belgium and the Institut français. As part of EXTRA, a program that supports French contemporary creation in Belgium.

Thanks to all the filmmakers and distributors, Teresa Castro, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Nicolas Feodoroff, Kristofer Woods