Aroma-Home’s edible stories : an urban community garden performs

Aroma-Home, an artist-initiated community garden in Villetaneuse, just outside Paris, France, originated as a way to poeticize damaged urban locations by creating small communally-created pockets of unexpected natural beauty. In 2013, Sarah Harper of Friches Théâtre Urbain joined forces with local inhabitants to reclaim public spaces marred by construction and neglect. Together, they began to alter the urban landscape with whimsical plant-based interventions that sprouted up behind construction fences. This guerrilla gardening soon led to the sowing of a community garden that wove together food-growing, story-telling and place-making and fashioned its particular identity through cultural practices around growing, preparing and sharing food of the multi-ethnic participants. The horticultural-culinary conversations became inextricably connected to gardening activities: edible stories involving food memories and horticultural skills that nourished those who prepared and consumed them. This ‘From the Field’ paper looks at how the community garden/art-making processes of Aroma-Home transformed a bleak construction site into a mini-urban agricultural ‘commons’ where imagining, planting and harvesting the garden and its edible stories were all shared