The Diaspora Garden: Watering Connections is a project by artist Seyi Adelekun. Seyi is passionate about the natural world and our connections to it. She creates spaces for people to unite and share communal land. She works in many different ways, often making large installations, drawing on her architectural background, and live performances.
The Diaspora Garden is a temporary community allotment open to all residents of the Pelican estate in Camberwell. A poly tunnel will be a hub for activities where Seyi and residents will grow a wide range of vegetables. Weekly workshops will explore herbalism, mental health and storytelling through foraging, movement and fun botanical crafts.
In July and August 2023 the free workshops will run twice a week. They are open to children and adults from the Pelican estate.
Through collaboration Seyi hopes to reconnect people to their rights to healthy food, land and cultural traditions.
From 5 July – 29 October 2023, Seyi Adelekun is also exhibiting at the South London Gallery as part of Lagos, Peckham, Repeat: Pilgrimage to the Lakes.
ABOUT SEYI ADELEKUN
Seyi Adelekun is a multidisciplinary artist of Nigerian heritage. She creates installation and performance art that encourages ecological awareness, environmental stewardship and spiritual relationship with the earth. She explores this through movement, ritual practices, making with natural materials and using regenerative circular economy principles.
Seyi’s work aims to convey the interconnectedness between all living beings by promoting biodiversity & celebrate local ecologies. Seyi sees collective making as a tool to nurture healthier relationships with our environment. Seyi explores this by facilitating creative nature workshops that focuses on creating spaces for deep connection and healing, especially within BIPOC communities, by reconnecting to ancestral ways of being with the more than human world.
Plastic Pavilion (2021) at Forest of Dean Sculptur Trail © Julian Reece