The Ephemeral Garden

 The Ephemeral Garden is a meditation on generosity. It was an installation and community art project that we created for the O+ festival in 2022 and 2024. All who enter were invited to take a book to give to someone and then take a book for themselves. All we asked in return was that the person share something about their choices. It was intentional to ask that they choose for someone else first before taking for themselves. The idea was to take them out of their head and their own desires and immediately begin thinking about others in their life who might enjoy a book. 

Because we were inviting people to give a gift, we needed to make sure that the books were good. This was hard sometimes; it's hard to give away books that you would otherwise sell. It was hard to shake the fear of someone coming in and scooping up all the "good stuff". By limiting everyone to two books though it was easy to make sure it was all good and that there was enough for everybody, it became easier to put wonderful books out for people to share. We had fun with it too. We filled the little parklet on the corner of Fair and N Front St in Kingston with piles, pillars, waves and even a throne of books. 

The garden was also filled with different ways for people to tell us about their choices. We had typewriters, cassette recorders, quills, markers, crayons and pens. We believed (correctly) that given so many choices, people would enjoy the play of how to say something and then be more relaxed about what they said. It worked well and we have shared some of their thoughts here.