Plotting (Against) The Garden

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 2021
A collaboration with Hussein Mitha


Plotting (Against) The Garden is an intimate, critical, and poetic sound installation that explores the politics of gardens and their entanglement with urban space. A collaborative work by Alaya Ang and Hussein Mitha, the work unfolds through stories and memories that reveal the garden as a site of embodied knowledge, ecological grief, and anti-colonial resistance. It reflects on the dual nature of gardens: as spaces of cultivation and refuge, but also of enclosure and exclusion. Emerging in dream-form within the urban architecture of Beacon Tower at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, the installation invites listeners to contemplate fundamental questions about land and labour. 


These compositions evoke embodied knowledge, ecological grief, and anti-colonial uprising, as well as the ambivalence of the garden as a form that keeps out as much as it lets in.



The work emerges through the urban structure of Beacon Tower in Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and invites listeners to contemplate the politics of gardens:

Who owns the land?
Who toils on it?
Who does the garden exclude?
How can we imagine a return to the land, to the commons, to a collective shared world beyond imperialist plunder and capitalist exploitation?




Sound artist Cindy Islam has tenderly constructed the music and sounds, reactivating the seed-dreams laid to rest in gardens across cities and sites of ecological destruction. The ambisonic soundscape generates loops and layers of frequencies, field recordings and noise. Cindy Islam morphs sound as texture, to develop an acoustic collage that facilitates a deepened listening practice.

Plotting (Against) The Garden is composed of three segments that play on loops at different parts of the day, evoking a diurnal and nocturnal landscape. Mimicking the gesture of plant life, listeners sync up with the sun through the compositions.