RHIZOO Gardening
Yanting Xiong (she/her) is an architect working at the intersection with visual art and beyond. Born and raised in Shanghai, along the flow of the Yangtze River, her work attends to the complex and fluid relations between human and environment. She holds a bachelor's degree in Landscape Architecture and a master's degree in Architecture, each situated in a different cultural context. Her practice is grounded in the process of making, through which she investigates questions of gender, materiality, ecology, and labor.
Her practice takes shape through three forms of making. Making of place: spatial practice through garden and architecture, acting as containers for living and inquiry. Making of objects: an encounter between body and material through drawing and installation. Making of texts: writing and publishing as experiment, opening space for voices that resist and imagine otherwise. Across these practices, she creates fragments, gestures, and ecologies that challenge rigid boundaries and reimagine belonging.
She has curated architectural exhibitions and participated in art residencies. Yanting moved to Germany in 2018, and now lives and works in Berlin, building a garden for feminist collectivity in Luckenwalde, Brandenburg.
Rhizoo Gardening is an ecological and community practice in an almost abandoned garden in Luckenwalde, an East German town facing transition towards a more sustainable future. Through the concept of collective making, it responds to the isolation of migrants who have little access to green space, and to the lack of community infrastructure in the neighbourhood. Situated at the border of private garden, allotment garden, and woodland, through years of human neglect, the border has become unclear. Rhizoo uses this situation as a metaphor to investigate the border between disciplines through collective making.
The project is structured around the Chinese 节气 — the 24 seasonal nodes that mark subtle shifts in nature's cycles — as a framework for tending the garden, gathering, and making together. The name Rhizoo comes from the resilient root system of the overgrown blackberry on site, and echoes the Chinese rìzuò, taken from Zhuangzi's quote of the ancient folk song: 日出而作，日落而息 — work as the sun rises, rest as the sun sets.
Rhizoo Gardening began from a simple need: to make and to heal through making. After years of practicing architecture within institutional structures, I wanted a practice rooted in process rather than product — one that could hold both spatial work and the slower, cyclical rhythms of gardening, drawing, and writing.