Lament
Lament
Bartram's Garden— Philadelphia, PA
July 31, 2006
As I researched John Bartram's garden, I learned that he had discovered a small grove of trees in Georgia in 1765. He gathered seeds and propagated them in his Philadelphia garden. The tree was last seen in the wild in 1803 and only survives today in cultivation. Lament was a meditation on the extinction of plants and the loss we experience when they disappear.
I led the audience through the garden, telling stories about plants that vanished either because they couldn’t survive in the wild or because they fell out of fashion and people stopped planting them. Dropping seeds like Hansel and Gretel, I led the audience to a wooded glen, where I sang a lament at the river’s edge. Then I paddled away in a canoe and disappeared.
Lament was a public program in collaboration with Katie Holten as part of the exhibition Soft Sites at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.
Photos by Aaron Igler
Video by Matt Suib