Researching Gardens: “Cultivators of Life”
The “Cultivators of Life” programme seeks to bring together ancestral knowledge inherited through traditional cultivation practices, contemporary gardening practices, and scientific knowledge
Ion Puican, 03.10.2026, 12:22
The “Cultivators of Life” programme seeks to bring together three forms of knowledge that have generally remained separate until now: ancestral knowledge inherited through traditional cultivation practices, contemporary gardening practices, and scientific knowledge, through dialogue with biologists, climatologists, landscape architects and architects. The aim is to create a new common language connecting these three worlds.
The project includes artistic residencies, discussions, visits and activities held directly in gardens. Adelina Luft, the programme’s initiator and curator, tells us more:
“‘Cultivators of Life’ is a multi-year programme organised by Tranzit Bucharest Association together with its partner institution MODEM, the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts in Debrecen, and co-funded by Romania’s Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
The programme runs for two years, from 2025 until the end of this year, and was conceived in close connection with another project run by Tranzit Association: the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life.
Designed as a long-term project, the station is located outside Bucharest, about 40 kilometres north of the capital, in the village of Siliștea Snagovului. Over time, it has developed into a community where a number of organisations, associations, colleagues and cultural practitioners coexist. They are part of this community through their shared care for the land they jointly own.
The research station is a place where we cultivate life by tending a biodiversity garden, which in turn forms an ecosystem that is constantly changing and growing. At the same time, it is also a space for artistic production and reflection, rooted in this living pragmatism and responsive to the conditions of the place itself. But it also opens those conditions up through different associations, collaborations and connections with other places, other theories, ecological ideas and various forms of experimentation, including architectural experimentation, among others.
… And the programme concludes with the final group exhibition we are preparing in Debrecen.”
The “Cultivators of Life” programme culminates in an exhibition entitled “Cultivators of Life: Growing Seedbeds of Knowledge,” open from September 5 to November 8, 2026, at MODEM, the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts in Debrecen, Hungary.
Curated by Adelina Luft and Krisztián Gábor Török, the exhibition brings together artists and researchers from Romania, Hungary and other parts of the world. Its focus is on six gardens that, over the past two years, have been transformed into spaces for research, encounters and the exchange of knowledge. Adelina Luft explains:
“‘Cultivators of Life: Growing Seedbeds of Knowledge’ is the exhibition developed as part of the ‘Cultivators of Life’ programme. It is a large-scale group exhibition.
The central idea behind the ‘Cultivators of Life’ project, and behind the exhibition itself, is something I have been developing over a number of years, first and foremost in close connection with my involvement at the research station and with my work as a curator, where I try to engage with interdisciplinary artistic practices.
My proposal for this exhibition was therefore to interweave three forms of knowledge. The first relates to contemporary, experimental and even community-based cultivation practices, and to the changes we are experiencing today — changes in the soil, the climate, and in what we can or cannot grow under these conditions.
The second is scientific knowledge. We need biologists, geologists and other scientists to provide us with practical, hands-on knowledge about soil conditions and about how plants can develop. More and more artists are entering into this kind of collaboration with scientists.
This is also what we do at the research station and within Tranzit Association. We try to learn from our various collaborators, while they, in turn, learn from what we are doing in the artistic field.
The third form of knowledge is what we have inherited from our ancestors — a kind of ancestral understanding of our relationship with the land, which has been lost and which we are trying to recover.
Within the programme, through the ‘Conversations in Living Thought’ with philosopher Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, and through our various collaborations with practitioners from the Global South, we are trying to bring Eastern Europe and its ancestral thinking into dialogue with the forms of ancestral and Indigenous thought found in the Global South.
In this sense, all the artists implicitly explore this intersection through their work. What we have come to realise is that more and more practitioners in the cultural and artistic fields, and even in the sciences, are bringing these different forms of knowledge together.
We should no longer separate nature from culture, nor should we separate these forms of knowledge from one another, because they all contribute to a deeper, more holistic and more comprehensive understanding of our relationship with the Earth and of how we might repair some of the damage caused by the project of modernity and by violent, excessive capitalism.
At the same time, they also offer examples of resistance.”
The project builds on an earlier initiative launched by Tranzit Association in 2021: the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, at Siliștea Snagovului, near Bucharest. There, artists and researchers work together on a biodiversity garden.
The programme also maintains a connection with the Romanian village and its traditional knowledge. Its first year focused on direct, hands-on experience in gardens. During the second part of the programme, a series of conversations entitled “Living Thought” was developed together with philosopher Ovidiu Țichindeleanu.
The project has also welcomed guests from Mexico, Palestine and India. (MI)
