STUDENT PROJECTS- NURSYAZWANI JAMALUDIN AND REBECCA WINKLER

This summer Nursyazwani and Rebecca investigated and participated in multiple kinds of creative, nourishing, reparative practices of placemaking at the Mercy street Growing Home garden in South Philadelphia. This project followed a period of transformation in the social life of the Mercy street garden which has witnessed shifting focus (both in terms of funding and collective efforts) from preventing displacement to placemaking and integration.  They ask:  how do everyday relations at the Mercy street garden offer a site to (1) cultivate belonging and (2) repair fraught ties / relations based on exclusionary practices in this multicultural, multilingual urban space?
The first 6 weeks of creating things together were focused on trellises, and the process of designing, creating, and adapting trellises using a mix of salvaged objects and locally sourced salvaged wood. Drawing on Rebecca's passion for woodworking and making functional objects from salvaged materials we were able to form a collaboration with expert woodworkers from NextFab in South Philly who joined in meetings with gardeners on zoom and in-person to help solidify the plan for the trellises so that they could support the very heavy vined plants that Karen gardeners traditionally grow such long squash, bottle gourd, bitter melon, and Karen. The practice of conceptualizing, designing, crafting, and installing trellises together elicited different modes of visualizing and describing structural elements across multiple registers of English, Karen, and Thai. 
As the garden began to flourish, they participated in traditional Karen agricultural practices, learning about the many different fruits and vegetables gardeners were cultivating based on seeds they had saved, or that had been passed around through networks of Karen refugees across the country. During the practices of daily tending, the Karen collaborators Nursyazwani and Rebecca worked with recounted their embodied memories of tending to these plants in different places throughout their lifetimes. Towards the end of the summer, they began conceptualizing different art projects that would beautify the space while also providing information about the rich variety of plant life that folks were cultivating. They had our first sign painting day in August, with more upcoming.