OSE 2024-26: Home is where the garden is
“Home is where the garden is” is the current cycle of our two-year programming model. Through a two-year thematic approach, this model explores how artists can work in more embedded, durational ways with our local community of practitioners, researchers, community partners, and public organisations.
This cycle invites artists and community members to collaborate in exploring the evolving and rhizomatic threads that connect our shared civic spaces, through a series of artistic commissions, collaborative projects, public workshops, and community initiatives.
Home is where the garden is runs from September 2024 to September 2026. To find out more about our two-year programming model, please visit Building an Art School for the Future.
View contributions and outcomes of the programme via our core programme pages below.
Home is where the garden is – Civic Programme
Home is where the garden is – Despacito Art School
Home is where the garden is – Associates Programme
Home is where the garden is: Material, Produce and Civic Space.
Our programming cycle for 2024–26, titled Home is where the garden is, explores the garden as a metaphor for spaces of cultivation, rooting, and unexpected encounters. The programme is built upon an ecological, rhizomatic* framework that emphasises the networks, systems, and communities that constitute civic space.** Throughout the cycle, we will develop artworks, events, exhibitions, and resources led by artists, community partners, and the current Associates Programme cohort.
Home is where the garden is is structured around three key research strands: Civic Space, Material, and Produce.
Within Home is where the garden is, we understand civic space as an interwoven mesh of shared social and political environments shaped by material and social interventions and interrelations—a space where individuals from diverse cultures, age groups, and lived experiences intersect. It is a site of ethical negotiations and partnerships, which we explore through our Associate Programme curriculum and seek to evolve through situated interventions and artworks within local civic contexts.
Our strand on material investigates energies, knowledge systems, and skills embedded across space and deep time. Material mediates between living and non-living ecosystems; it can shape and disrupt techniques and technologies. Materials may be malleable, rigid, raw, uncertain, virtual, charged, found, or processed. These investigations unfold through our Civic Programme in collaboration with local communities, our Public Programme, and our artist-led curriculum within the Associates Programme. The materials we engage with map local geologies and histories while also tracing global flows and circulations of matter—from a grain of soil to the layered debris of shopping centre multiplexes.
We understand produce as both a verb—to produce—and as a noun linked to land, labour, and industry. In both senses, it reveals how energy is processed and transformed, how things are made, distributed, and altered by human and non-human forces. This perspective links diverse sites of production and transformation, such as the plant factory consortium Thanet Earth, Haeckels’ seaweed laboratory, and the rewilding efforts in Blean Wood.
OSE invites artists whose practices resonate with these themes to develop them through artistic research, talks, workshops, collective projects, and artworks in collaboration with our partners.
* The concept of the rhizome as a model for knowledge structures was first proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Rhizomatic philosophy contrasts the rhizome with the tree: while the tree represents hierarchy, linearity, and fixed patterns of meaning, the rhizome is characterised by non-linearity, multiplicity, and interconnectedness. It forms a distributed, open-ended, and semiotic network without a central organising principle.
** Civic space refers to physical or digital environments where individuals—rather than governments or businesses—exercise their human rights and fundamental freedoms. Civic engagement shapes political, economic, and social realities. Civic space can be understood as both a set of legal conditions and a lived environment that enables people—individually or collectively, offline or online—to participate in their communities, express themselves, organise, protest, support one another, and engage in the governance of their locality or country.
