EARTH SCHOOL

PING!
Porto Municipal Gallery Education Department

September 2023 - March 2024
Canelas School & Cristal Palace gardens, Porto

Year-long educational project in a public school curated by Matilde Seabra,
with support from producer Mariana Sardon and teacher Lígia Lima

For a year, primary and high school science students followed us outside, looking for the school’s green spaces. Those fields and gardens taught us a lot, although being scarce and always clutched in between the stones and cement of paths and courtyards.

From microscopic analysis, and drawing instructions, step by step, we discovered that the web of life emerges from the tiniest bacteria. Following simple geometric operations, life becomes a complex and organic whole, which sustains living soils and makes it possible for plants and animals to exist above it.

This project was divided in four different phases, dedicated to four stages of ecological succession, which we can readily be observed in the school’s gardens. In each session, students produced drawings which went on to be transferred to raw linen cloths, using only natural pigments extracted from plants living in each of those more or less developed biomes.

On the last day, we used those painted cloths as picnic towels, where the food covering them was also organised successionally. We started with the pioneer non-mycorrhizal plants, and moved onto garden vegetables, which then led us to bush berries and orchard fruits, until we got to the nuts and other forest foods such as acorns.

Once everyone was full, the towels went on to be exhibited along with the original drawings the students made and, in the square places they left behind in the gardens, new species were sawn for a more abundant future in this school.

Cabeceiras de Basto

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