bingenTV and the Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions: A Conversation Between Sophie Seita, Naomi Woo and Declan Wiffen

This interview with Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo explores bingenTV, an exhibition at Mimosa House (London) in the Winter of 2023, and The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, a queer-feminist, and ecologically engaged creative project. The conversation traces the Society’s origins, fictional and real, and its multimedia performances, workshops, and installations – including bingenTV, a satirical 1980s queer gardening talk show. Seita and Woo reflect on performance, rituals, archival fabulation, queer ecologies, and reparative ecological practices, drawing from a range of creative practitioners, such as Hildegard von Bingen, Vita Sackville-West, Pauline Oliveros and Alison Knowles, Mary Delany and others. The discussion explores the ambivalences of queer historical recovery, complicity, and exclusion – foregrounding gossip, humour, and embodied performance as valid modes of knowledge. Focusing on ways of cultivating community across human and more-than-human boundaries, the conversation navigates the tensions between healing and dissonance, critique and care, fiction and fact.