Future Memoria at the Surrey Art Gallery
Imagining the future together
What happens when a community garden walks into an art gallery? In the summer of 2024, the PLOT Community Sharing Garden was invited to take part in Future Memoria, an exhibition at the Surrey Art Gallery curated by Rhys Edwards and bringing together more than 30 artists and works.
The exhibition wondered about the future—our hopes for it, our fears about it, and the worlds we may already be creating without quite noticing. There were visions of abundance and possibility alongside ecological crisis, artificial landscapes, technology, and more dystopian imaginings. And into all of that came the PLOT, perhaps with a little soil still under its fingernails.
I loved this. Because the PLOT is not an imagined future. It is a small piece of land where, for years, people have been experimenting with another way of being together—growing food, making art, sharing knowledge, gathering in ceremony, caring for place, making friends, making mistakes, trying again, and discovering what community might look like when we actually practise it.
Future Memoria gave us the chance to bring some of that living experiment into the gallery, and to invite other people into the wondering. What kind of future do we want to grow?
Leaves of Future Memories — The Wishing Tree
PLOT artist Tracie Stewart created a Wishing Tree for the exhibition called Leaves of Future Memories. Visitors were invited to write a kind wish, hope or intention for the future on a paper leaf and add it to the tree. One leaf became many. Over the course of the exhibition, hundreds of wishes accumulated—small expressions of the futures people hoped might still be possible.
But the story of those leaves did not end in the gallery. At the end of the summer, we brought them home to the PLOT. During our Autumn Equinox gathering, the wishes were placed into the garden soil, where they could return to the earth and become part of the ground from which future seeds would grow. It was a wonderfully simple circle:
Imagine a future.
Write it down.
Offer it to the earth.
Plant something new.
Photo by NK Photography courtesy of the Surrey Art Gallery.
For the exhibition opening, members of our community appeared in handmade masks and capes. Suddenly the garden had sprouted legs. Creatures, characters and curious beings moved through the gallery, bringing some of the playfulness, unpredictability and collaborative spirit of the PLOT into an institution more accustomed to artworks staying politely in one place.
For me, that is part of the pleasure of public engagement art. Sometimes you contemplate the future. Sometimes you put on a cape.
The Capes — Stories We Could Wear
Each performer had created a cape from whatever was calling most strongly to them. Rella created a Four Seasons Nature Cape, using a technique of pounding plant pigments into the cloth. Jasmeen’s Transformation Cape told the story of her own blooming, from a shy recluse into someone willing to step forward in full flower. Andree, working in tandem with Shayla’s vision, created a Community Cape, reflecting the relationships and collective spirit at the heart of the PLOT.
My own cape grew from something very precious to me. I wanted to honour the beautiful shawl made and worn for twenty years by my beloved teacher, Grandma Amy. She later gifted that shawl to me, and the cape became a way of carrying her presence, teachings, and love into the performance with me.
The capes were an important part of our performance. Afterwards, they were hung in the gallery, where they continued to tell their stories.
Creating Together
Public workshops connected with the exhibition invited participants to create avatars and narrative masks and to contribute to two enormous communal figures: The Natural and The Made. The finished figures then travelled out of the gallery and toward the PLOT, where the gathering continued with a community plotluck.
I love that movement, from gallery to garden, individual imagination to collective creation, artwork to shared food. The boundary between artist and audience becomes a little less important. Everyone has contributed something. Everyone has become part of the story.
A Future We Practice
What I loved about Future Memoria is that it allowed the PLOT to bring something very practical into a conversation about the future. Hope does not always have to be an abstract idea. Sometimes it looks like a garden. Sometimes it is a wish written on a paper leaf. Sometimes it is people making something together, sharing a meal, caring for a piece of land, or gathering at the turning of a season.
Perhaps the futures we long for begin that way—not all at once, but through small acts of imagination, participation and care and practice.
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Beyond the works which addressed the aforementioned themes, a particularly striking example was by PLOT, the community garden project, which emphasized the intersection of public art, sustainability, and collective action. One of the most touching aspects of this work was its ability to transform a seemingly simple act—gardening—into a radical exercise in reclaiming space and fostering community resilience. The work not only provided a living, breathing counterpoint to the dystopian anxieties explored elsewhere in the exhibition but also instilled a sense of hope and joy. By engaging local residents in shared cultivation and food production, PLOT demonstrated how small-scale, collective efforts could resist the overwhelming forces of environmental degradation and social alienation, making utopian ideals tangible in everyday life.
—Mohsen Veysi, Future Memoria: A Timely Exploration of Utopia and Dystopia in The Peripheral Review