Garden of Hope

Abstract

Garden of Hope is a network of entangled beings, materials and processes, all engaged in interspecies collaborations that create intertwined frameworks for ecological repair through multidimensional research-creation praxis. This thesis explores breathing as both a conceptual and material method for artmaking, rooted in my lived war experiences and informed by ecofeminism, posthumanism and material sciences, intending to cultivate and disseminate radical hope to spectators and communities. My collaboration with living algae creates biomedia artworks and transdisciplinary textiles that actively capture carbon and propose new ecologies of care while offering speculative blueprints for the future. The thesis exhibition operates across media and reframes the exhibition site as a living ecosystem where human and non-human agencies co-create through the exchange of breath. Drawing on ancestral Croatian textile traditions and oral histories, Garden of Hope questions planetary survival, intergenerational memory, and the role of art in creating socioecological resilience amidst our fragmented zeitgeist.