“When I call myself a gatherer, I mean that, even without my hands in dirt, I aggregate, together with collaborators, disparate pieces from an ecosystem, and develop the appropriate container for each collection”
-Mindy Seu

𓍊𓋼𓍊𓋼𓍊

Follow me to my digital garden. I have planted the seeds already.

I have inherited the act of gathering as a radical practice of reconnection. Rather than the act of gathering out of scarcity (hoarding as some may call it), the internet has served as a place of gathering in which limitations of material conditions lessen, of which I have learned what abundance feels like. Abundance in the form of open source softwares, of digital libraries, of virtual gatherings, of forums&indexes, of digital gardens. Rather than ownership, I have learned to gather the way I have learned to weave–gathering as a form of connecting. I have learned what a tender form of collecting can feel like, what gathering without displacement may look like. Mindy Seu, gardener of the Cyberfeminism Index, in her essay On Gathering, defines “gathering [as] the tender and thoughtful collection of goods for your kin, and a moment for reunion, for celebration, and for introspection around those goods.” (Seu)



Gathering, to me, invokes a sort of earthiness that brings back the same sensations I had as a 6-year old with dirt-soaked fingernails. Digital gardens bring back the same joy of play. I think that joy lives in the incomplete, cyclical nature that also guides its framework–a collection of digital media that is tended to with the intention of return. (I’ve been dreaming a lot about return lately). The garden does not live within the White Picket Fence™, rather it acknowledges the histories of systemic oppression rooted in gardening practice, particularly those of black and indigenous descent. It rejects the colonial imagination, and employs a series of strategies that create an interdependent relationship (Hansteen-Izora). It values multiplicity, safety, wonder, and weeds. It does not build a utopian garden, rather it values the care, the harm, death, birth, and all other cycles that permeate (Hansteen-Izora). It allows us to experience the grief, the joy, the love that comes with tending to a being in its entirety.

Digital gardens have taught me modes of being in ways I cannot begin to articulate (or maybe I don’t wish to, some things are meant to stay inexplicable, a bodily experience). I want to express my deep care and gratitude to all of the digital sites that have taught me how to play, how to get my fingernails dirty once again. A gratitude towards those who dare to gift their presence into the digital space, to leave traces of tenderness that continue to touch and unfurl and grow.

My favorite sites of play.



𓍊𓋼𓍊𓋼𓍊

return