Rooting Resilience: Cultivating Community and Nature in Killinarden
"Rooting Resilience: Cultivating Community and Nature in Killinarden" is an innovative partnership by the Killinarden Community Centre, with its intergenerational community groups, socially engaged environmental artist Sophie Von Maltzan, and South Dublin City Council. The project is a socially engaged environmental journey that blends outreach, collaborative research, and site-specific environmental art around the Killinarden Community Centre. By weaving together history, ecology and artistically exploring the many ways the grounds can be used as a shared community garden, "Rooting Resilience" fosters a deeper connection between people and place. Through creativity and collective action, it aims to cultivate both community spirit and a thriving natural environment.
Through Sophie Von Maltzan’s socially engaged approach, the community will collaboratively create nature-based, site-specific, and meaningful installations and events that are creative, interactive and playful. Together, they explore and transform the open space around the Centre, inspiring people of all ages to connect with each other, the neighbourhood and the greater context, exploring the values of engaging with nature.
Through a phased series of workshops, the community groups that meet in the centre explore, research and reimagine the outdoor space, with Sophie Von Maltzan and other invited artists or experts. Through hands-on engagement, participants create art and construct environmentally conscious additions to the grounds, shaping a shared vision for how the space can best serve the Centre’s clients, staff and the wider community. These environmental art interventions don’t only enhance the landscape but also give the Centre and its surroundings a unique identity and atmosphere.
The programme of workshops is developed on an ongoing basis together with the community centre and its clients, throughout the project. There are many groups of all ages that meet at the centre and Von Maltzan has begun in June to work with all of them through a variety of projects. To date they have explored the field behind the Centre through weaving large Willow installations, which remained insitu for several weeks. All community groups: The Golden Circle, The Women's Shed, The afterschool Montessori, The Youth Outreach and The Carp clients took part in the week-long weaving project. Von Maltzan also organised a Mythology Story telling around a campfire event just before Halloween, for which the Montessori children prepared a puppet performance with handheld paper puppets that they developed through workshops before the campfire event, to which the entire community was invited. It is in the nature and an essential part of socially engaged art, that the programme may change during the project process of creating art together, responding to the ongoing learning and exploring on how they can together create a meaningful outdoor environment for the Centre. The next event Von Maltzan is planning with the community is the installation of a Wish Tree and a St. Brigid Day parade.
Von Maltzan has been collaborating with other experts and artists on the projects to date:
Lucy Lambe, socially engaged artist
Muirenn Lyons, Theatre maker and Puppeteer
Aoife Lowden, Irish ancestral wisdom keeper
And Candlelit tales, Irish storytelling