The Violent Beauty of a Banlieue Wasteland Garden

Abstract

Participatory arts can invite stormy and violent forms of participation when they are commissioned for sites where frustration, territorial control and pre-emptive self-defense involve practices of accepted street codes by those living within racialized, febrile territories. Through the case study of Aroma Home, a participatory art gardening project, in Paris’s northern peripheries, I analyze instances of affective, symbolic, performative and territorial violence as non-normative political acts of participation. Examining the underlying contexts and logics that led to these incidents, I argue that the most insidious act of violence in the project was the creation of our invasive, extractive garden on a hitherto unclaimed and unidentified patch of ‘free’ public ground. In creating a new identity for this wasteland and defining its use, we effectively limited, and implicitly prescribed, modes of participation that were culturally alien to those we most wanted to involve.