Story Residency with Meech Boakye

Commissioned by Active Cultures as part of its ongoing series The Garden, Boakye’s Research Poems lives online and will be complemented with the artist’s occasional takeover of AC’s Instagram Story Residency throughout the year. Following their residency in Spring 2023, Meech will be featured as a resident once more from February 5-9, 2024, culminating their long-term project, Research Poems.

Meech Boakye’s Research Poems is a digital garden and artist project that will grow and flourish through four seasons. Over the next year, Boakye will investigate four different plants, foraged and gardened, in DIY cheese-making experiments. Beginning with Stinging Nettle and an introduction to foraging, each plant-centered chapter is grounded in transdisciplinary research shaped by the artist’s real-time exploration of the metonymic relationship between the digital and the non-digital. As the project continues, they will tend to this garden with notes from the field; poems written collaboratively with AI; recipes; sonic outpourings; and more. Herein, Boakye explores how gardens can offer a framework for cultivating experimental knowledge systems, embedded in the fragmented and temporal. Together these shifting parts generate a kind of “commons,” an assemblage of the digital, the speculative, and the ecological, to be explored with each visit to the garden.