Eva Rodinis
Keywords: Observation, Urban nature, Attentiveness
Reweeding the Gaps is a site-based research of a forgotten interior courtyard that explores the overlooked ecological relevance of urban spatial gaps as spontaneous habitats. In neglected spaces, overgrowth emerges, unfolding where human intervention and control rarely look. Building on artist and spatial theorist Kwan Queenie Li’s weed theory, this research notices that covers, folds, holes, gaps, cracks, and corners might be ecologically interesting niches of the city that can offer another reading of urban space and its biodiversity.
Field notes, recordings, and findings from an interview with an urban ecologist materialise into an in-situ installation that shares reweeding as a way of widening the perception of where and how urban biodiversity can be found, read, and related to. Reframing a forgotten courtyard as a habitat challenges traditional conservation that is entangled with human mastery and its tendency to control and objectify nature.
To walk into the courtyard is to step into a pavement crack – a lifeworld where the human scale is no longer standard, but only one of the many possible ways of being alive in an other(’s) garden. How we notice shapes what becomes visible, revealing each material as a landscape and habitat of another scale.
Different modes and scales of observation gain physical form in site-specific paper sculptures that guide into the field of attention what might otherwise be overlooked, each relating to specific topographies within the site: the corner, the crack, the wall, the growths, and the soil.
Enlivened through sound, these become instruments for reading the space on an intimate level, and ephemeral objects of observation in themselves.
The detailed ecological findings are collected in a field guide: an unfolding book that translates the site-specific reading of courtyard ecologies into a wider framework of living principles for reading other ‘urban gaps’.
This framework proposes new interactions, angles, postures, and conversations of noticing to offer a method for sensibility in spatial reading and ecological attention to a non-specialist audience that interacts daily – and unconsciously – with ‘urban gaps’.
This kind of ‘design-as-observation’ positions attentiveness as a non-extractive form of ecological care, and non-interventional practice as intentionally making space for what might spontaneously grow.
Reimagining Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery and Anna Tsing’s ‘arts of noticing’ as a spatial method, Reweeding reads transitional spaces as already complex, living, entangled ecosystems whose natural histories and futures can only ever be partially held by human infrastructures.
Therefore, Reweeding the Gaps is a practice akin to conservation, focused on looking closer to understand and revalue what is already here – unplanned, spontaneous, and diverse – and the conditions it needs to persist. It grew into my position as a designer-observer – interested in getting to know spontaneous and storied growths in their microcontexts, and becoming an attentive reader of the world in which agencies express themselves.
My practice continues learning from ecology and natural sciences, blending observational experiments with material poetry, and inviting others to experience other lifeworlds, and observe their overlooked complexities with care and understanding.