May 31, 2025 - Guided daydream: Salima Punjani
Workshop with Salima Punjani
Collaborator : Salima Punjani
Date: May 31
Time: 4-6 pm
Language: English and French
Masks mandatory. Covid testing prior to the event is encouraged.
Places available: 12
REGISTRATION FULL - JOIN THE WAITLIST
Join Salima Punjani for a guided deep listening session using the Companion Plants installation as a starting point. This will be a chance to sensorially connect with yourself and others, while reflecting on themes such as slowness, networks of care and connection. This gathering will close the symposium and serve as an opportunity to reflect on the question - How do we protect a radical idea?
The workshop will be held in English and French. An LSQ translator will be present if needed; please specify your need in the registration form. Please note that we need to confirm the interpreter's services by May 28 - reach out to us if you can’t make it to the activity!
Companion Plants
AUDIO DESCRIPTION OF THE INSTALLATION HERE
"Companion planting is the practice of growing one plant to help another as part of a community. Fruits, vegetables, and herbs are noticeably more resilient and productive when each member supports the next. The benefits can be one-way, such as when nectar-rich flowers planted around fruiting crops, like tomatoes, improve insect pollination, or reciprocal, such as when the famous Three Sisters of corn, pole beans, and squash are grown together for mutual benefit. By growing communities of plants that are known to support each other, you can save a lot of time and potential heartache." [From The Old Farmer's Almanac]
Companion Plants is a response to the question How do we protect a radical idea? It explores questions around slowness, messiness, mutual support and reciprocity. Salima Punjani started collecting plant cuttings from friends and family starting in January 2025, and has been growing them in anticipation for the symposium.
Starting slowly, with spaciousness, honoring the time it takes for roots to grow and accepting that sometimes the conditions aren’t quite right. Visitors are invited to engage with the plants, either taking them and passing them on, offering a cutting of their own and taking one home, or simply just appreciating the care in which they were grown. They are also invited to add a word to the bottles, contributing to a constantly transforming collective poem.
The artist was inspired by a walk in the rose garden at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton, Ontario. The garden was stunning and a little unruly. In contrast to the manicured, clean, pristine rosariums prized in other gardens, the roses were surrounded by companion plants that added colour and vitality to the environment, above and below the roots. Forced by a pesticide ban to reconsider their growing practices, the garden decided to use a companion planting approach to completely transform the growing conditions of the roses, nourishing the biodiversity of the environment. Accompanied by plants like dill, aster, yarrow and lavender, the roses flourished alongside their mutually supportive companions.
The artist offers the following questions for reflection inspired by the concept of companion planting:
How do we support deep, systemic change?
How do we navigate the messiness of support?
How do we encourage mutual flourishing?
How do we navigate dependence on destructive forces?
Is it possible to let go of control?
How can we make space for diversity - in a way that doesn’t feel like we are competing for the same resources?
How do we nourish the environment underneath the surface?
How do we value this often invisible, essential care?
Salima Punjani is a multisensory artist who uses mediums like soft sculpture, vibrotactile, spatial sound, visual poetry, digital video and photography and relational aesthetics to build spaces for connection. She is particularly interested in how multiple senses can be used to expand the possibilities for people to feel welcome in art spaces as well as to create artful experiences of empathy, intimacy, and connection. Her recent work explores themes such as isolation and resocialization processes related to COVID-19, rest as resistance to systemic injustice and how medical data can be subverted into finding human connection rather than pathologies.
We thank the Canada Art Council for its support in this project.
