A Library that Wanted to Be a Garden

Artists: Jillian Crochet, Kota Ezawa
Curator: Naz Cuguoglu
Exhibition Dates: September 3 - October 1, 2019

It all started with a garden. In Istanbul, we gathered at Gezi Park (1)—slated for destruction—to keep it at least in our memories. The first thing we did was to form a library in the park, for equal access to the circulation of knowledge, to exchange our books with each other—a temporary autonomous zone (2). When I arrived in the Bay Area, I sat in front of Meyer Library, on Macky Lawn, under the sun, reading Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse which I’d borrowed from the library shelves. As I read: “A yellow sun          A green sun  a yellow sun A red sun      a blue sun,” I thought about the urge to protect the garden and the library, and about their co-existence.

Meyer Library stands out to its users for its intimate relationship with the natural environment which surrounds it—a garden with its own natural habitat hosting a profusion of living organisms, plants, birds, and all that chthulucene. (3) As CCA transitions to one campus, in San Francisco, the exhibition A Library that Wanted to Be A Garden would like to open up a discussion around what a library / a garden means for community as kinds of public spaces where people gather. The works in the exhibition invite nature into the library to create invisible tentacles between these two entities, and for the viewer to think further about the potential of their synchronicity.

Jillian Crochet’s living sculptures are (failed) attempts to keep nature alive at all costs. She collects algae and moss to grow in artificial surroundings. Presented in plastic containers—creating new-age terrariums—persisting on recycled air, the viewer is witness to their fragility. Occasionally, a plant will come back to life, despite its new habitat. In this way, the artist challenges the perception of the life cycle—creating a glitch in the exhibition space. Accompanying these living ecosystems, Crochet’s plant archetypes—sewed from green fabric—lie like alien creatures from the future with their anomalies.

Kota Ezawa’s video City of Nature (2011) brings together 70 nature scenes from 20 different pop culture films through a looping animation. The scenes come from a large array of films, ranging from Late Spring by Yasujirō Ozu to Rambo: First Blood. Ezawa draws these scenes by hand and transforms them into animated imagery. He collages them together in a way that they follow each other to build an abstract narrative. In this way, the landscape becomes more than a beautiful background scene in a Hollywood movie but a protagonist itself. This creates a new narrative around nature, a departure from the human-focused and manmade concept of the anthropocene, by re-positioning nature in the center.

Bringing the works by Jillian Crochet and Kota Ezawa together at CCA Meyer Library, A Library that Wanted to Be A Garden aims to rethink the importance of the green area around the library a last time before it goes under construction. Selected books on plants and gardens from the library offer additional perspectives. Rosa Novak’s Seed Library for CCA’s Oakland community garden accompanies these works within the library space both as an echo of what will be lost and the possibility of new growth. 

[1] A wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Turkey began on 28 May 2013, initially to contest the urban development plan for Istanbul's Taksim Gezi Park.
[2] The Temporary Autonomous Zone is a book by anarchist writer and poet Hakim Bey published in 1991.
[3] In Staying with the Trouble (2016), Donna Haraway talks about the Chthulucene—small living organisms and their significance for the survival of human beings.