Assembly - The woman who thought she was a planet (Border Buda 2025)

This is the "Assembly - The woman who thought she was a planet (Border Buda 2025)".

Presentation

The Assembly - The woman who thought she was a planet (Border Buda 2025) took place in Buda, Vilvoorde, in 2025, at the invitation of Border Buda. On the occasion of The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, Agency summons Thing 001359 (Chico Mendez Mural Garden) in order to bear witness.

On December 31 1997, Chico Mendez Mural Garden, a community garden located in the Lower East Side in New York, was bulldozed under real estate pressure initiated by the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani. This garden was created by inhabitants and artists early 90s in the memory of the Brazilian eco-activist Chico Mendez murdered by loggers in 1988.

The garden was constituting a kind of ecosystem where the diversity of the plants interacted with the works of arts, mainly mural paintings and a large linear sculpture representing a body in a graffiti style, made with the plants of the area. In order to protect the garden from destruction, the community launched a defense procedure arguing that the whole ecosystem should be considered as an artwork.

In 2010 Agency already proposed to present Thing 001359 (Chico Mendez Mural Garden) as a permanent garden at the site of the bulldozed forest Lappersfort, situated south of Bruges by the canal to Ghent. The proposal was less to make an exact reproduction of the Chico Mendez Mural Garden in the way the garden ”was at a certain frozen moment in time” and more to let Thing 001359 become.

At Buda, Vilvoorde, Thing 001359 (Chico Mendez Mural Garden) will take off from there where the garden was left behind in New York. The map of the lot of the bulldozed garden will be lay-out on a 1 to 1 scale on the Buda field, determining the space of the Assembly which will be organized on June 22 at 3 pm and will gather people for a fabulation from and around the controversy.