Garden Rehearsals
Yeb Wiersma dug into the experimental gardens ecotect Louis Le Roy began creating in the 1970s in the modernist suburb of Lewenborg in Groningen. Set among the high-rises, Le Roy’s wild gardens, where weeds and walls did not exist, showed how people, plants, animals and waste materials might share a place. Wiersma treats these gardens as a living archive.
From the gardens she weaves together a range of histories. Lewenborg takes its name from Evert Lewe, a shareholder of the WIC. The Groningen soil is full of gas, and decades of extraction have left earthquakes and damage behind. In conversations with residents, stories surface about the Burma–Siam railway, about Indonesian histories, and about Creole language and music that emerged and survived under colonial pressure.
Weeds run through the work as a motif: plants that travel, adapt and persist, and that resist attempts to control them. Wiersma connects that resilience to questions of migration, of living together, and of who stands inside or outside the walls.
