Web Art Garden
World Environment Day 2023
5th June 2023 theme is Beat Plastic Pollution.
Introducing the UN Decade for reviving and protecting our ecosystems.
#BeatPlasticPollution
#GenerationRestoration
#WorldEnvironmentDay
A United Nations Day and vital platform for action every year since 1974
encouraging worldwide awareness and action to protect our environment
http://www.worldenvironmentday.global
Over 30 artists across 6 countries participated in
Web Art Garden
World Environment Day 2023
Web Art Garden Parallel Events Worldwide
Listed East to West – Following the Sun
The Art of Recycling, Upcycling and Reusing
Bali, Indonesia
Offering by Diane Butler and friends of Dharma Nature Time
Ritual Preparations
Klaten, Central Java, Indonesia
Offering by Agus Bima Prayitna of Teatr Mantra Gerak
Video of the Movement Mantra ritual for my grandson’s wedding procession, Sunday Pahing June 25, 2023.
After the Catholic blessing in the church, the bride and groom moved to a simple food stall near an old building that used to be a tobong gamping (limestone kiln).
Processions and rituals were held:
– The release of a pair of parrots by the bride and groom.
– Procession of Kepel Tree seedlings (a rare tree in Java) by the bride and groom. The tree seedlings were then planted in the garden.
– Umbol (collective) prayers (Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism).
– On the kelir (screen), a bunch of rice and jantur (Javanese folk-tale) puppet characters of Panji Asmara Bangun and Devi Sekartaji.
– A series of offerings of food crops.
—-
The date 25 June this year combined Sunday in the Gregorian calendar with Pahing, one of the five special ‘Pasaran’ days in the Javanese calendar, used for important events.
In the time before the wedding (including World Environment Day), I undertook traditional Javanese spiritual practices and rituals. These included sleeping less at night for 40 days; bathing and fetching water (the water used in the wedding ritual seen in the video) at midnight from a water source on the slopes of Mount Merapi; and making pilgrimages to the graves of my parents and ancestors.
I collected the food crops from the slopes of Mount Merapi. These were offered in the wedding ritual with the message and hope that the bride and groom and others of their generation at the ceremony, will be aware of the variety, sovereignty and quality of good wholesome food, which is healthier for everyone and the environment than over-consumption and processed and packaged food.
Panji and Sekartiji are the central characters in the traditional Panji story. The two shadow puppets here are my own designs for telling stories about rural life and community, where Panji and Sekartiji, although prince and princess, have a love story with many struggles and in their wanderings often become ordinary village people. In this wedding ritual, the puppets Panji Asmara Bangun and Dewi Sekartaji are a message and symbol of fertility, which I took from the original Javanese mythology (rather than from the Mahabarata – Ramayana as is common in other Javanese wedding customs).
The kepel tree seedlings used in this wedding ritual are from seeds that I planted four years ago.
Bahasa Indonesian translation
Video ritual Mantra Gerak untuk prosesi pernikahan anak saya yang kedua, Minggu Pahing 25 Juni 2023
Setelah pemberkatan secara Katolik di gereja, pengantin berberpindah tempat (ke warungmakan sederhana, dimana ada bangunan tuabekas tobong gamping/pembakaran batukapur).
Diadakan prosesi dan ritual:
– Pelepasan sepasang burung perkutut, olehPengantin.
– Prosesi bibit pohon Kepel (pohon yang sudahlangka di Jawa) , oleh Pengantin. Berikutnyaditanam di kebon.
– Umbul doa (Islam, Kristen, Hindu danBudha ).
– Pada kelir (screen) seikat padi dan tokohwayang jantur; Panji Asmara Bangun dandewi Sekartaji.
– Serangkaian sesaji berujud hasil bumi.
—-
Tanggal 25 Juni tahun ini menggabungkan hari Minggu dalam kalender Masehi dengan Pahing, salah satu dari lima hari ‘Pasaran’ khusus dalam kalender tradisional Jawa Pawukan, yang digunakan untuk acara-acara penting.
Pada saat sebelum pernikahan (termasuk Hari Lingkungan Hidup Sedunia), saya melakukan praktik dan ritual spiritual tradisional Jawa. Ini termasuk mengurangi tidur di malam hari selama 40 hari; mandi dan mengambil air (air yang digunakan dalam ritual pernikahan yang terlihat di video) pada tengah malam dari sumber air di lereng Gunung Merapi; dan berziarah ke makam orang tua dan leluhur saya.
Saya mengumpulkan hasil bumi dari lereng Gunung Merapi. Semua ini dipersembahkan dalam ritual pernikahan dengan pesan dan harapan agar kedua mempelai dan generasi penerus yang hadir dalam upacara pernikahan tersebut, sadar akan keragaman, kedaulatan dan kualitas makanan yang baik dan sehat, yang lebih menyehatkan untuk semua orang dan lingkungan daripada makanan yang terlalu banyak dikonsumsi, makanan olahan dan makanan dalam kemasan.
Panji dan Sekartiji adalah tokoh utama dalam cerita tradisional Panji. Kedua wayang kulit di sini adalah desain saya sendiri untuk menceritakan kisah kehidupan dan masyarakat pedesaan, di mana Panji dan Sekartiji, meskipun pangeran dan putri, memiliki kisah cinta dengan banyak perjuangan dan dalam pengembaraannya sering menjadi penduduk desa biasa. Dalam ritual pernikahan ini, wayang Panji Asmara Bangun dan Dewi Sekartaji merupakan pesan dan simbol kesuburan, yang saya ambil dari mitologi Jawa asli (bukan dari Mahabarata – Ramayana seperti yang biasa digunakan dalam adat pernikahan Jawa lainnya).
Bibit pohon kepel yang digunakan dalam ritual pernikahan ini berasal dari benih yang saya tanam empat tahun yang lalu.
Touching the Earth in the Hills of Veneto
Veneto, Italy
Offering by Franca Fubini
Beautiful Wood
France
Offering by Sylvie Gimmig
Sensing the Cold Wind
Folkestone, Kent, UK
Offering by Emma Mehan
Sensing the cold wind
Warm rock
Sheltering me
As I lie flat on my back.
Touching the rock with my feet
A springy resistance,
A gentle push,
In my legs.
Turning over,
My back exposed
To the elements,
Releasing guts into gravity.
Thoughts are swirling
Fast as wind,
Whole body distinct
From the seascape.
Turning again,
The wind is battering
My face, my hair
Until a subtle shift
Of connecting to stones.
They rattle and slide
As I move my legs
To standing.
Shuddering
And shimmying
Over rolling rocks,
Crackling under foot.
Bending to lift
Two weighted stones,
Releasing them
Into the sea.
I want to age like Sea Glass
Cleaning rivers
Collecting plastic
Being of earth
Softening of earth having body.
Finding the window for pause
Pause
Oxford, UK
Offering by Helen Edwards and friends
I want to age like sea glass by Benadette Knoll
I want to age like sea glass. Smoothed by tides, not broken. I want the currents of life to toss me around, shake me up and leave me feeling washed clean. I want my hard edges to soften as the years pass—made not weak but supple. I want to ride the waves, go with the flow, feel the impact of the surging tides rolling in and out.
When I am thrown against the shore and caught between the rocks and a hard place, I want to rest there until I can find the strength to do what is next. Not stuck—just waiting, pondering, feeling what it feels like to pause. And when I am ready, I will catch a wave and let it carry me along to the next place that I am supposed to be.
I want to be picked up on occasion by an unsuspected soul and carried along—just for the connection, just for the sake of appreciation and wonder. And with each encounter, new possibilities of collaboration are presented, and new ideas are born.
I want to age like sea glass so that when people see the old woman I’ll become, they’ll embrace all that I am. They’ll marvel at my exquisite nature, hold me gently in their hands and be awed by my well-earned patina. Neither flashy nor dull, just a perfect luster. And they’ll wonder, if just for a second, what it is exactly I am made of and how I got to this very here and now. And we’ll both feel lucky to be in that perfectly right place at that profoundly right time.
I want to age like sea glass. I want to enjoy the journey and let my preciousness be, not in spite of the impacts of life, but because of them.
I wish that everyone who said they believed in angels would actually believe in insects
New Forest, UK
Offering by Kristina Bourdillon
I wish that everyone who said they believed in angels would actually believe in insects….
We need the living world, that truest of worlds, both in death and in life: thanks to other animals, human life is vitalised. Animals, their senses alert to every scent and whisper through their paws, antennae, wing-tips and noses, are out guides and out healers. Mindedness surrounds us: in air and water, on land and in the soil under our feet where the lovely, holy worm, in sweet complicity with the dreaming Earth, quickens death itself into life…
Awareness surrounds us. Tingling.
Jay Griffiths
From the opening words to her 2021 book ‘Why Rebel’
Roadside flora on Yewtree Heath
New Forest, UK
Offering by Keith Miller
Passing by
by Keith Miller
Outside the windscreen,
beyond hearing,
A world so slow it’s invisible
without adornment
Marking time
and territory
in ragged trails
through what passes
as empty space
These offhand roadside trash offerings
Scratching the palm of the land
ANCESTOR DREAMING
by Pauline Peters
In the palm of the land,
there is a woman sleeping.
What she does not know
is that there, inside the curve of her foot
is an old man. He lives there,
inside the curve of her foot.
The bones of her body are his instrument.
The bones of her body have no marrow.
The old man plays her bones like a flute.
What she does not know
is that her breathing in
rustles the leaves of his brain.
What she does not know
is that her breathing out
is the sound of his memory.
(from ‘The Salted Woman’, Hedgespoken Press, 2021)
Apple Tree
Southport, Merseyside, UK
Offering by Carran Waterfield
Growing plastic
Watering plastic
Blossoming plastic
Fruiting plastic
Harvesting plastic
Clingfilm memory
of suffocation courtesy of
Public Money
while
The bird who is a lady
Weathers the storm
Seeking refuge
Growing up
and
Growing down
Moving in daily life
This year, I decided to mark the 5th of June, integrating World Environment Day in my daily life.
Exmouth, UK
Offering by Isabel Moros
Moving in Moving....
Moving in Daily life...
The story within the story...
The journey begins
The journey began on the 5th of June on my way to work. The beauty of the Estuary and the changing of the tides marked the tempo of the journey....Slowly, slowly, I transitioned through the landscape, crossing the waters and moving from Exmouth to Exeter....
Then, I reached the campus where I work. The waters gave way to the trees.
The journey continues
The trees speak and they move:
From the fluidity of the flowing to the flowering of the roots.
Trees as ancestors and witnesses of the journey. Stillness in movement, chatting and listening, supporting and breathing.
The journey back:
Going back to the water and going back to the sea...
Birth, death, rebirth....
Dusk touching the light, touching the heart, touching the soul, touching the earth....
Rahayu, rahayu, rahayu
Plastic Body and Land
Hembury Woods, Devon, UK
Offering by Daniela Coronelli
Plastic Body and Land
One thing I learned about practising shiatsu
over the years is that we are made of nature.
Rivers like arteries pump nourishment to the land.
Blood irrigates muscles to take all movement shapes
and trees grow to the sky from fishes’ remains.
Yet, plastic is everywhere……
Now our aquatic chums’ corpses carry remains of
bags, flip-flops and picnic cups
directly into the ground
under vegetable and grain roots.
Meals with a difference, delivering additive-rich food
to the intestines, gradually inhibiting digestion
and poisoning the blood,
slowly killing the body and the land.
A Garden Indeed!
California, USA Devon, UK
Offering by Margit Galanter
This year, as an offering for World Environment Day, I would like say something about the Web Art Garden, itself.
I first learned about it in 2008, when Prapto was coming to the Americas for a workshop coordinated through our festival, seeds (formerly Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance + Science). Preceding his arrival by train from Penn Station, NYC with Marilin Martinez and a friend whose name I sadly forget this moment…., Diane Butler and Prapto sent us a packet of reading materials and articles about Amerta Movement and the activities of the circulation at that time. We were gathering materials for a “library/archive” for all the participants of the festival, and they delivered! It included writings by Sandra Reeve and a Web Art Garden convergence that had taken place in the years before.
I remember something powerful about receiving these writings, and learning about the kinds of international encounters that were taking place, felt resonance, received important perspectives on ecological approaches to life in Bali, Java, and all around. Throughout Prapto’s time at Earthdance (where the Festival took place, on the rural and indigenous lands of the Nipmuc, Wabanaki and Pocumtuc people, also known as the hill towns of Western Massachusetts), Prapto expanded the connections, nurtured the relations amongst all living things, and brought facets of the gathering together in unique ways. He brought a quality of intention, learning, and movement that changed the whole group, no matter if they were “in” his workshop or not. Prapto was always able to embroider life experiences into something more in depth, more culturally rich, more beautiful.
Years later I can see that kind of moment of reading and receiving as a “seed” for what it provoked in me and for what still may grow. I think of all the ways I have been able to practice with Prapto and in his passing with his influence shining so darn brightly amongst new configurations, and the wildly creative and potent ways people gathered in place, embedded in and through their humanity, with nature, and spiritual life. Gifts of intercultural dialogue, inter-being, inter-creative. It is a gift that sets my life in motion and offers a wellspring of future ways to be in movement practice as a celebration and research in Life and Livingness. I thank all the people who participate in Web Art Garden and World Environment Day over the years, especially the folks who coordinate and have done so over time, and how these forums live alongside and through and under and within the embrace of the Amerta circulation worldwide.
In December 2023, I had the opportunity to share time with Helen and Keith for an online conversation of their practice in organizing this organism, WEB ART GARDEN, and it was such a delight to learn how they shepherd it, guide it, reflect on it, and dialogue with each other and the whole changing field.
A small excerpt to share with you all who see this for the moment:
Helen: it’s like connecting in a web, it’s the ecological web, it’s like connecting in place, in person, passion and concern, art for the earth.
Margit: where do you both feel this Web Art Garden is living? What is it? … Any felt experience about this garden in relation to the larger Garden?
Helen: It’s in the garden! …..Which garden, where, in what way?
Keith: For me, it really is in the Garden, and in a way because if its international connections, and the differences in the offerings, and it’s “itself” when it’s working as a garden, and its in the garden, and it seems to have all these kinds of reflections. I was thinking how extraordinary it was how Prapto came up with this before the internet and web became common currency, and the whole garden mesh, how different people or places around the world will light up.
…
Keith: The Web Art Garden doesn’t purport to be exclusively Amerta, doesn’t try to define it or contain it, and I think that is also of garden sense is that. …Where is it going someone asked?
Helen: Rather than as a question, as a mystery, and seed that’s evolving. Whose is it anyway? It was conceived by Sandra and Prapto, and many other people were involved, as well. Who gets named is an interesting thing. And it doesn’t belong to anybody and it’s evolving, and who knows really?
At the end of our conversation, I said, perhaps this conversation, itself, could be the offering, and something about that seemed right. Hopefully out of context of the full hour plus these words give you a sense of the deep care this is being nourished, nurtured, fertilized, planted, and watered.
A Garden Indeed!!
Let’s look after our world together
Web Art Garden Facilitators
Helen Edwards and Keith Miller
2023webartgarden<at>gmail.com
Web Art Garden 