Residency: The Plants We Call Home

The Plants We Call Home Residency - Before 1856 all color came from plants, mushrooms, insects, and minerals worked following complex technical natural dyeing principles for extraction and fixation. From these foundations sprouts eco printing, a contemporary adaptation that transfers color directly from plants onto fabric or paper, preserving the shape and texture of each leaf or flower. Ultimately, eco printing is a dynamic process that invites for more interaction with the landscape and welcomes a wide diversity of plants. In this workshop series, participants will explore local plants and natural materials to create unique eco printed pieces on fabric and paper - preparing the fibre, selecting appropriate plants, and creating creative compositions. This intuitive and alchemic process values curiosity over perfection and offers a platform from which to explore creative expression, cultural exchange, and connection with nature. Through this practice, participants may begin to recognize and build familiarity with the plants of their new city, nurturing a growing sense of belonging, home, and connection to place.

About the Project, written by Nina Fraser - The garden has long been imagined as a sanctuary: a cultivated space of care, repair, and quiet resistance against instability. Neither fully wild nor entirely controlled, it holds tension between vulnerability and resilience—mirroring the lived experiences of citizens who navigate displacement while cultivating new forms of belonging.

This year's cycle of Art & Craft Refúgio, situated inside Jardins do Bombarda, Lisbon's former psychiatric hospital, draws on the garden as a sanctuary as a metaphor for the selected artists working methodology. As a site of slow labour, shared knowledge, and seasonal cycles, the garden offers a framework for making that prioritises process over product, attentiveness over extraction. Within these workshops, craft practices become acts of tending—stitching, weaving, shaping, and growing—through which participants can reclaim agency, memory, and embodied knowledge often disrupted by migration.

The garden resists romanticisation. It foregrounds questions of access, labour, and ownership, reminding us that sanctuary is always political. By engaging refugees and migrants not as recipients of care but as co-cultivators of space and meaning, the workshops reimagine the garden as a collective commons: a place where artistic practice can foster solidarity, mutual care, and speculative futures rooted in shared ground.