The theme for 2024-26, titled Home is where the garden is, explores the garden as a metaphor for spaces of cultivation, rooting and unexpected encounters. It is built around a rhizomatic framework that focuses on the networks, systems and communities that form civic space.

Home is where the garden is is the first cycle of our integrated new two-year model, which puts community knowledge, expertise and skill at the forefront of what we do through co-developed projects with our neighbours and local community. Workshops with young artist members of Despacito Art School serve as active research and development for our Civic Programme and Associates Programme curriculum, as well as provide opportunities for local families to take part in hands-on making and growing workshops led by artists, educators and community practitioners.

Despacito Art School: Home is where the garden is
Summer Exhibition 2025

Friday 22 – Sunday 24 August 2025

An exhibition of artwork made by Despacito Art School with guest artists Samara Scott, Harold Offeh and Flora Parrott, with the work made with community partners as part of Open School East’s roaming civic project Home is where the garden is – find out more and RSVP for the opening preview using the link below.

Read more: Despacito Art School – Summer Exhibition: Home is where the garden is

Despacito Art School – Summer Exhibition: Home is where the garden is

Join us to celebrate ongoing projects with Despacito Art School in our summer exhibition

October 2024
Mapping and Typography with Polly Brannan

Despacito Art School learnt about typography and made their own typefaces with drawing, collage and found materials to create a new OSE typeface for Home is where the garden is. They also undertook mapping exercises to think about civic, public and green spaces in Margate, including sharing stories of migration and mapping how communities form and are established in shared civic space.

This session led to the development of the new visual identity for Home is where the garden is as well as informed the design, content and location of other programme strands.

December 2024
Despacito Art School Winter Celebration

Our winter celebration brought together families across neighbourhoods to meet and celebrate the work of Despacito Art School. Here we enjoyed refreshments and took home framed, printed ABCs that the young artists made with Polly Brannan in October using found natural material from the surrounding neighbourhood.

February 2025
Collage, Planting and Growing with Polly Brannan and Community Gardener Aaron McKay

Polly Brannan led still life drawing of plants and flowers through watercolours, pencils, pens and collage to use in our community zine and cookbook. Aaron McKay, OSE’s Community Gardener, then worked with Despacito to share their favourite recipes and plant seeds for the community mobile growing unit that they have been developing. Despacito took these home to their families to nurture, before planting out later in the year with Aaron.

The food crops grown by Despacito will be picked and distributed in late summer and at harvest for Despacito family and friends, community participants and neighbours in Cliftonville. 

April 2025
Making Miniature Worlds with Samara Scott

Artist and fashion designer Samara Scott returned to join Despacito to make miniature worlds inspired by science fiction and ecology. Despacito narrativised their miniature worlds through filming, sound effects, found objects and storytelling as metaphors for environmental and climate change.

May 2025
The Open Life of Plants (Plant Power Jamboree) with Harold Offeh

Performance artist and educator Harold Offeh joined Despacito to make costumes, characters and a final performance of their Plant Power Jamboree based on Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants album from 1979. Despacito researched where their favourite food and other plants come from, which they used to investigate interdependent networks and ecologies that link their own gardens, parks and local crops to wider global systems of movement, production and trade. Despacito shared their favourite foods and shared recipes for the community cookbook that we will publish at the end of the project. 

Despacito also met architect and designer Jonathan Boyle from State Studio to catch-up on the development of their mobile growing unit. In this session, Despacito and Jonathan shared ideas for the design of their mobile growing unit and spoke about ways to integrate the multiple languages of the group into its graphics and visual identity.