Editor's note
By Maia Kenney

The imaginary garden is not just a place of sweet escape. I have to admit when the current first-year Contextual Design students of Design Academy Eindhoven came up with this beautiful theme for the second edition of the digital zine (the first edition being Exit Night, Enter Light, 2024), I was transported back to memories of feverishly reading The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911) and Frog and Toad Are Friends (Arnold Lobel, 1970) as a child. Or Narnia, or even The Magic School Bus (Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen, 1986—). To me, any moment of scaling down to the size of an ant and picking through the wilds of a garden was the closest an adult had come to depicting the wonder and strangeness of being a child. But I am a romantic and certainly didn’t cotton onto the undertones of growing up and war and queer companionship and ableism in these and more books. And anyways this note isn’t about me, it’s about what 21 students saw in their own imaginary gardens that led them make this delightful zine.

Imaginary Gardens is presented for the second time on The Couch, though in a moment of uncertainty for our platform due to Het HEM’s closure in July 2024. Still, the space is there and I like to think of this zine as a patch of hardy weeds growing through the discarded couch cushions towards watery sunlight, strong roots holding the frame together until new funding comes along. As last year, the students came up with this collective project in a series of workshops led by me (Maia Kenney, curator of The Couch); Sophie Keij (of Brussels-based design studio Atelier Brenda, which is responsible for the genius design of The Couch); and creative coder Simon Dirks, who walked the students through the magic of making a totally unique digital space in 2 days. The students came up with a democratic (one could even say rhizomatic) process to determine the theme that best fit their interests and passions. The hand-drawn feel of the zine’s front page (the opening animation is literally hand-drawn, I’m told) is an apt and cozy reflection of what the students wanted to depict. The lovely soundscapes (one for day, one for night) by Linda Učelniece and Silver Giannakidi play on a loop until you forget which browser window they were in and resign yourself to eternal birdsong on your laptop. They’ve managed to make something with its hands in the dirt, but head in the clouds.

The contributions themselves were varied interpretations of the theme, all surprising and holding unexpected delights (as a true garden should). Many turned inward, musing on the hapless gardener discovering the joys and devastations of life as they are encountered on a stroll. In their hands, the gardener was arbiter of their own desire – for the flesh, for the bush! – or a tangerine farmer, holding onto sweet fruit as they depart for unknown lands. Other gardeners looked to the traces left behind on our inner garden by loved ones here and gone.

Some gave voice to the plants and ecosystems that are greatly reduced by being placed into a garden by human hands. They wondered if resistance and resilience would be necessary if humans weren’t around to admire the beauty of landscaping or the heroism of plants that survive despite all odds. And some of the contributors looked to the digital as the true imaginary garden. They uncovered the magic held in uncertain wonders of algorithms and in the alchemy of the OLED screen. The technology that fits a macrocosmos onto a nanochip. Weird. And, wonderfully, we got a little mini-game that you can play to discover one student’s experience of imagination itself.

The brief they came up with is worth sharing:

The imaginary garden is timeless. As ecosystems run their course, decay and life cohabitate in a tensional coexistence. This friction creates a mutable space that allows the transformation and exploration of otherness as a resilient act. From here, the fantastical landscape of memories, identity, care and vulnerability appear as a microcosm growing into and from each other.

While wandering through the imaginary garden, we observe how the physical mirrors our own internal gardens.

Credits
Imaginary Gardens was made possible with support from Afaina de Jong, Design Academy Eindhoven and The Couch
Web development: Simon Dirks
Design development with: Sophie Keij of Atelier Brenda
Fonts: Ouvrières by Laure Azizi. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.
Sligoil by Ariel Martín Pérez. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.