A Community Garden With Radical Potential Blossoms in Los Angeles
The garden is a collaboration between performance artist Paige Emery and Echo Park Rise Up, an autonomous collective of unhoused people living at Echo Park Lake.
By Anya Ventura
Hyperallergetic
Oct 16, 2020
Excerpt:
Ayman Ahmed, who lives in a tent in Los Angeles’s Echo Park, wanted his roses to live. He had planted the small rose bed — “my babies,” he called them — in the community garden a few weeks before, a painted white cross staked in the soil.
The garden is a collaboration between performance artist Paige Emery and Echo Park Rise Up, an autonomous collective of unhoused people living at Echo Park Lake for the past seven months. While most guerrilla gardens are situated in vacant lots and abandoned pockets of the city, this one sits in a highly trafficked public park, slivered along the grassy edges of Echo Park Lake, where giant, swan-shaped pedal boats bob in the water.
Emery, a housed neighbor in Echo Park, is a multimedia performance artist with a keen interest in ecology. A co-director of the activist group the Future Left, she became involved with Echo Park Rise Up after attending a memorial for Brianna Moore, an 18-year-old resident of the park who overdosed in August. Now, where Moore’s tent once stood is a small cross, her photos tacked onto the wood, surrounded by onions and tomatoes growing in recycled dresser drawers.
In the encampment, residents have jobs: cooking meals, organizing and distributing food donations, working security, or cleaning up the trash in the park. Everyone who participates receives 40 dollars per day from a communal pot sustained through donations to the collective’s money-sharing apps.
