The Garden of Decay

In the Garden of Decay, Seraina Grupp has dedicated more than a year to the act of protecting life at the former AMASS Garden. Confronting a failed and derelict site, Seraina brought together nearby residents and worked to convert abandoned material into world-building material: building chicken coops, restoring greenhouses, and creating kitchens on site. The aim of this overhaul was to maintain biodiversity on the site, continue a pre-existing ecosystem, and test out new forms of relating the environment to food systems. She asks: why should we eat from a stable table if everything we eat is from unstable systems?

The book Braiding Sweetgrass – an inspiration for Seraina’s work – begins with the creation myth of Turtle Island “Skywoman Falling.” In the myth, Skywoman falls from her home the Skyworld to earth, where she is caught by a flock of geese and then helped by the other animals, who work with her to create a new land known as Turtle Island. Kimmerer says, “Skywoman’s descendants are not women who would step away from the edge, if it meant the protection of life.”

We invite you to borrow a bicycle from the reception at KC and visit the AMASS Garden to find out what is at stake in the protection of life.

(Text written by curator Mariam Elnozahy)

Seraina Grupp (*1998, CH), a trans-disciplinary artist with a social practice in art and food, focusing on current struggles and crisis through the social lens of food and environments. Her projects aim to queer our thinking and foster relationships beyond imagination, valuing details and small narratives within complex realities. Currently graduating from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and previously studied the Gramounce Institute, she is part of local and cross-cultural collectives and founded TRANSFER in 2024 to include a wider community and claim space in between.