Cross-pollination 2022
Since 2001 The Trinity Session has been concerned with the logics of art-making in complex, social-public situations; where the dynamics of history, memory, context, available resources, and creative solutions converge to create unique artistic conditions and opportunities. As global practising artists, born and bred in Johannesburg, the politics of social and spatial change in South Africa since 1994, have motivated Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter to create interdisciplinary conditions for enhanced collective practice beyond the market driven constraints of the contemporary art world. Hence many of The Trinity Sessions’ durational city based projects are centred on place making principles through creativity, enabling greater collaborative ecosystems of knowledge sharing and project development.
The hard lockdowns of the Covid19 Pandemic, forced the Trinity Session to rethink its agency within society, and while several nationwide projects were executed with digital tools during this period, The Trinity Session Team looked inwards to make sense of the looming mental challenges of social distancing and isolation. Hence The Green Projects Programme was conceived initially through growing and greening from home, which then extended to prototyping growing installations at Trinity’s base at Orchards Project in Orange Grove, Johannesburg.
Since early 2022, the Green Projects Programme has evolved into an elaborate series of public interactions and workshops exploring the collective care paradigm through the lens of mycology, permaculture, child centred design, arts counselling and so on.
Drawing on a selection of projects from our various team members portfolio’s (including Pauline Borton, Ciara Struwig, Tammy Palesa Stewart, Lavinia Otto-Williams, Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter) the multi-screen installation presented at the Gardening of Soul: Introduction exhibition, shares our work in the form of juxtaposition, where the interrelationship of content is suggestive of a cross pollination between concept and implementation and art and green activism.