Sarah: The plant mugwort plays an important role in the Listening School.   Why is that?

Katie: Mugwort grows in forgotten places in the neighborhood: out of the cracks in the sidewalk, through piles of trash by the trolley, in vacant lots, by the river where concrete has been dumped. It is the first thing I noticed when I got off the trolley.

Mugwort grows where it is needed: it helps with anxiety and depression, which many people we meet say they experience. Mugwort also promotes healthy dreaming and sleep – it is the great protector of the herbs and the great connector to the plant world. As a part of the Listening School, students provide information about local healing plants, and give participants a small handmade dream bag with mugwort inside in exchange for stories.

Sarah: Where has the Listening School travelled and what are some of the things you’ve heard?  Or what does a typical week in the Listening School look like?

Katie: We set up under a sycamore tree in Bartram’s Village, the public housing development adjacent to Bartram’s Garden, for a week where we met a cookie baker and a smoothie expert and many people sang and shared. We went to an empty lot on Woodland Avenue, the oldest street in the area, where there was a tavern and stone schoolhouse, and a place to buy feed for the horses. We took the cart in front of Esteves Mini Market on 54th and Grays Avenue, where people who work at Bartash Printing across the street come for coffee and steak sandwiches, and wings – they stopped to talk to us about how togetherness is the most important, with ink on their hands from the printing press. We went near Woodland Academy, where we made art with 2-year-olds and teachers, and finally, we set up at Bartram’s Garden by the Schuylkill River, where people shared stories of water experiences, painted river feelings, saw leeches, and wandered and thought.

Participants have been sharing songs and poetry, paintings and maps, words of wisdom about the places they live and love. Conversation is healing as is listening and being open and vulnerable to other truths. We are practicing being present in a place. We are listening.

Sarah: What is next for the Listening School?

Katie: After an initial tour of the neighborhood, the students asked if they could spend more time at Bartram’s Garden. They want to share the specialness of the river, their secret places, and the wonder of this park with their community.

We are planning a Listening Trail to connect Woodland Avenue with the River, along 54th street where the water would flow during a rainstorm. Many people we meet do not know that there is a river very near, a place to clear the mind, to fish, and to be. This is all the same landscape, once a forest, then John Bartram’s farm, and now urban with shops and smells of hot dogs and fried chicken, and fences and block parties. The water still runs downhill to the river, and we share the watershed.

We want to make the listening permanent, some of the unknowns into knowns, to open up ways to be and walk and see a little bit differently in Southwest Philly. So much is real, and so much is healing.

About Southwest Roots:  Southwest Roots is a creative placemaking collaboration between Mural Arts Philadelphia and Bartram’s Garden that works to engage neighbors in shaping the future of both the garden and the surrounding river neighborhood. The Listening School is one of several artist residencies and community-based projects taking place in and around Bartram’s Garden over the next two years.

Katie Bachler is an artist and educator interested in connections to the world around us and to each other. Her work takes the form of maps, meals, walks, parks, schools, gardens, conversations, and moments. She is a fellow at the Baltimore Museum of Art mapping the idea of home in the city, and helping to create spaces of learning and love in the museum. She has worked with young people for over 10 years, at such organizations as LACMA, Slanguage, and High Desert Test Sites. She dreams of running a healing general store in Vermont.

Sarah Schultz is an independent curator and public engagement consultant whose work focuses on developing collaborative projects between artists and the public She was previously the Director of Education and Curator of Public Practice at the Walker Art Center where she led Open Field, an experimental platform for social interaction, collective action, and socially-engaged art. In addition to working on Southwest Roots, she spends time on her own research project, Herbarium for the Anthropocene, to document stories about people and plants in a time of global climate change.