A Growing Story

On a derelict Belfast city centre site we created an edible heritage garden, cultural venue, and learning space that not only grew food, but built relationships, welcomed creative voices, and told stories about: our past present and future, climate, land, our city, people, space, belonging, migration, exchange, and change.

This exhibition—housed on a corner of the now cleared site, in the shell of the Art Deco Bank of Ireland building—records the process, celebrates the place, and acknowledges the precarity of this meanwhile project in the context of climate crisis. 

Brink!, quarto, and Grow NI, co-created A Growing Story as a place for meeting, listening, talking, learning and acting together. In this space – limited by dereliction, listed status, and pending plans for redevelopment – we reworked our project materials and concepts to adapt and build a sustainably focused simulacrum of the 18 month project. Scaffold poles became our free-standing framework, industrial container sheets (cut from our onsite project workshops to make windows and doors) became our information panels, street art hoarding became work tables, our cooking hearth became the metaphorical centre of our exhibition and allowed us to retell the stories of how we build community around food. The project and this exhibition is a rejection of dereliction and a challenge to rethink how we can make cities that work for people.