Garden State: Corinne Silva

In this beautifully illustrated book, artist Corinne Silva offers a new way to think about gardens: like maps, as a way of allocating space. Using images that she made on a series of visits to Israeli-occupied territories between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, Silva shows how the gardens in these lands are simultaneously material and symbolic evidence of continuing colonization. Featuring photographs taken in twenty-two different Israeli settlements, Garden State also includes a taxonomic table of common colonizing plants assembled by botanist Sabina Knees, an essay by Val Williams, and a conversation between Silva and architect Eyal Weizman on the little-known link between gardens and colonization that can be traced from the eighteenth century to the present. A book that, like a garden itself, is both beautiful and political, Garden State will change the way we think about cultivation and colonization.