Tending Sanctuary

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Tending Sanctuary

Independent research funded by Penny White Project Fund, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Culture and Animals Foundation Interview, Scholar in Residence for VINE Sanctuary

GSD advisor: Francesca Benedetto
On site project advisor: Pattrice Jones

Tending Sanctuary is a multispecies ethnography of VINE Sanctuary, a place designed around an ethos that centers farmed animals as protagonists and co-creators of the site. VINE is a 100-acre sanctuary in the re-forested mountains of Vermont, home to over 700 rescued, formerly farmed animals who use their newfound agency to form complex social and ecological relationships with humans, wild species, and the landscape itself. The book's chapters (The Sanctuary, The Landscape Architect, The Forest, The Soil, The Residents, and The Stewards) describe, illustrate, and map the sanctuary to tell how residents self-actualize, build community, co-create spaces, and shape material and ecological cycles. Seeing the landscape shaped by healing domesticated animals brings a perspective on practicing a land ethic and an animal ethic together. This requires moving beyond the conventional "land community" lens, which generalizes and values species on conditions of their ecosystem contribution, toward a multispecies lens that recognizes more-than-human beings as socio-ecologically entangled with one another while also individually having inherent self-worth, histories, and worldviews. The work offers VINE as a model for designing sanctuary landscapes that foster individual and collective agency and the healing of both animals and land.

A note on Observation / Mapping
This project draws on immersed fieldwork, contributing to the growing genre of multispecies ethnography. To give observations a temporal dimension, I deployed a creative methodology which I call movement mapping, elaborated upon in The Residents chapter. After some time at VINE, I began tracing the movements and locations of selected residents at regular intervals for about five contiguous hours per day. The maps' lines and marks capture time in which I was in direct relationship with, and fully attentive to, the residents. To the best of my ability, I followed careful research ethics guidelines described in a research workshop by VINE Sanctuary's affiliate scholars and read residents' body language.