First presented after two years of intermittent lockdowns across Tāmaki Makaurau — and during the first year Matariki was celebrated as a public holiday in Aotearoa — Twin Cultivation was conceived as an invitation to reconnect with the whenua (land) and the people we share the city with. 

Presented as a miniature garden, this temporary installation invites members of the public to sign up for a ‘harvesting’ session. In each session, two strangers are paired up. They enter the garden together, and are invited to get to know one another through a series of food-related questions before unearthing a ceramic vegetable to gift to the other person to take home. 

Developed by artist Cindy Huang 黄馨贤, designer Micheal McCabe, and creative producer Rosabel Tan, the work builds on Cindy’s interest in the relationships that Chinese migrant communities can and could have as tangata Tiriti, and creates space for participants to collectively consider the histories of the land, the many people we share this city with, and the possible futures we could create. The title, Twin Cultivation, is a nod to the idea of companion planting: the idea that different plants grow stronger together than apart. 

Through each harvesting session, we hope to create unexpected collisions: conversations that might not have happened otherwise, the discovery of shared histories, and — at the end — a constellation of keepsakes across Tāmaki Makaurau, spread like seeds in the wind.

In this first iteration, 240 handmade works were gifted across two sites in Britomart and Panmure. This was accompanied by a free publication featuring the histories of each site, an exploration of each vegetable and a series of recipes, as well as a Te Tiriti o Waitangi workshop led by Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga.
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