The Garden of not Forgetting

The Garden of (not) Forgetting

Artistic research / İstanbul, Frankfurt, Münster / Depo İstanbul / with Eda Aslan

‘‘The Garden of (not) Forgetting is a carrier bag story. It is a collection of “open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life”. In the particular universe of Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden, Dilﬂad and Eda have discovered and gathered together multiple geographies, histories, stories, species and hopes.

I have had the privilege to follow this assemblage take shape since its beginning when we walked together in The Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Gar

den in 2017. The space was officially transferred to the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs but still in its original function and accessible. The glasshouse of the garden was a magical receptacle of plants gathered from all different parts of the world: an interior which contained the exteriors of many climates and geographies. The Garden of (not) Forgetting poetically blends stories of diaspora, transplantation, adaptation and taking root told in plants with those of its founders, their families sent to exile by the Nazi regime or the Republic of Turkey, back and forth, spun in politics, history and life.

The earth of the Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden has been inscribed by identity politics, rifts, ex

iles and coercion as well as life, care and continuity. The Garden of (not) Forgetting is a transcription, or better yet, a propagation of the damaged space and everything connected to it into a version of alternative politics: alternatives which act by recreating an accessible version of the inaccessible herbarium, and naming another one after the female scientist whose name was previously not uttered and telling the stories of the oscillating lives of the scientists burdened by politics of their own species but adopted and rescued by a planetary garden. This is a work of salvage and that of resistance, one which not only collects but recreates from pieces, remembers and propagates its subject and its entanglements in soils reimagined.’’

Excerpt from Of Carrier Bags, Gardens and Boxes, exhibition text written by Aslıhan Demirtaş

for more details on the works see the online catalogue > > >

Unutma Bahçesi; The Garden of (not) Forgetting asks in the face of possible move and destruction of the only Botanical Garden of Istanbul University due to authorities decision: “Is it possible to record a place, to keep its memory alive, to make space for the garden in urban memory?”. The artistic journey, which was initially centred around the Istanbul University Institute of Botanics, Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden and the plant life established here; gained new layers as it extended its focus to the archives, and the stories of the garden’s Jewish German founders s who were in exile in Turkey during WWII.

Exhibited at

DEPO, Istanbul, 14.04-06.06. 2021
Jewish Museum of Franconia, 14.07-26.02. 2022