Weeding with max+noa

Please bring a plant,
Drinks and snacks will be served.

Those ‘cunning folk’ max+noa (fka Sheaf+Barley) have been in residence with LADA since late 2017 responding to our relocation to our new home and helping us settle in to our new neighbourhood in Bethnal Green.

They have developed a project that looks at LADA’s history through the plants that have grown in and around its former homes. On the evening of 10 May max+noa will talk about their journey through both LADA’s history and the East End of London, and are inviting everyone who has some kind of history with LADA to come along with their own plants to be part of a collective planting – and remembering –  and laying down of roots at The Garrett Centre. This event will be followed later this year with a screening of Weeding, a film of their journey.

“A weed is an invention of cultivated and urbanised space, a plant in the wrong place, a disrupter and an invader to what is already there. Weeds can be useful challenges to hegemony or can run wild and establish their own dominance, like nettles that can be picked for food or like knotweed smothering all other living stuff. LADA has been growing in-between the cracks for almost twenty years and a lot has changed since 1998.

Where is LADA at now? Who is LADA made up of and who have they affected? How can LADA continue to help create spaces that are useful and challenging while also subverting the invasion and overrunning of urban and social space through the gentrification which it arguably has been made an unwilling party to? The history of LADA and its movement through the city is a small reflection of the city itself, and both these things are made and maintained by the people who inhabit it.

People who have been involved with LADA in any shape or form are invited to bring their own plants on the 10 May 2018 and plant them in the space. This planting is a commitment to the future, to caring for those who inhabit LADA’s space, to growth and renewal.

The work is a sort of pilgrimage to LADA and an elegy to the changing face of East London, and the complex and sometimes difficult interrelation that exists between the two, a hopeful challenge and a way to reconsider the past and present.” max+noa

LADA has also commissioned max+noa to develop a collaborative project, The Mansford Window, creating a stained glass window in collaboration with local folks for our new home at The Garrett Centre. Details of this commission will be announced shortly.