Since April 2023, the rooftop terrace of the Academy of Theater and Dance has been home to an emerging community garden - herbs, vegetables and flowers, growing and thriving above the school. Starting with only a few raised beds, the garden has grown and expanded over the past two years, becoming a small ecosystem eight stories above the ground. The garden maintenance is a community effort, in which a loosely affiliated group of people from all over the Academy - from staff, students, to teachers - entangle themselves within this web of ecological care: we all water the plants, transplant seedlings, and harvest. And we wonder about what it means to garden in a precarious urban environment, above an art school, and how we care for the (more-than)-human communities that make this garden.

The rooftop garden is where we tend to eco-social relations at the intersections of ecology, social justice, and art. 

How do we care for this garden as a group? A garden, essentially, is an ever-emerging negotiation of a shared space. This does not only include the plants, but the soil biome, pollinators, parasites as well as the humans entangled with a garden. The garden above the school has become a gathering point for (more-than-human) community, we meet among the weeds and flowers. 

The caretaking of the garden is self-organised and a bit anarchic, stitched together by regular "garden gatherings", in which we grow the roots of ecological care into art education. As we come together in the garden gatherings, we might find some plant wisdom hidden among the flowers: The garden gatherings are moments where entanglements become visible, where we collectively tend to a blooming and growing future of ecological care rather than give into the despair of looming climate collapse. Often, we invite an artist (or a small collective) whose practice relates to gardening, to share their work or ideas, and merge their artistic practice with the hands-on work of tending to the plants on the rooftop. Our guests include dr. masharu, Müge Yilmaz and the Four Siblings Garden, Sophie Dandanell from the Garden department at the Gerrit-Rietveld Academy, Jasmine Parsley, and many others. 

The garden is supported by Climate Imaginaries at Sea and the ATD Lectorate, as well as the ATD's Platform Sustainability.