Artober & CP Live, "Invisible Neighbors" with LA-Based Studio Tutto

Welcome to our next airing of a CP LIVE* conversation, this time in celebration of Artober in conversation with Sofia Laçin and Hennessy Christophel, of LA-based Studio Tutto. On highway underpasses, school walls, public park welcome centers, and city water towers, the epic hand-crafted murals of Studio Tutto tell visual stories of invisible nature to help people connect and become familiar with what is surrounding us, but we often do not notice. Their “thoughtful site-specific pieces invite and incite softness and meaningful connection between people and place, and in so doing, they are “optimistically shaping the way we see ourselves and the world around us.” The interview and gathering for it took place around this same time last year, when Studio Tutto’s Mural “Invisible Neighbors” was completed and unveiled for the first time as a centerpiece for the Welcome Center at LA’s storied Griffith Park, one of the largest municipal parks embracing urban wilderness in the United States. With over 4200 acres of both natural chaparral and landscaped parkland, it is a complex and interesting refuge for humans, wildlife, and plant communities. Situated in the arid eastern Santa Monica Mountain Range, the park features varied topography and diverse plant communities, including coastal sage scrub, oak, and native walnut woodlands, as well as riparian creek vegetation and deep canyons. It is an ongoing experiment in how humans and wildlands intersect, interface, and, in the best-case scenarios, strive for a compassionate coexistence. One celebrated example of this struggle is the life of a mountain lion who spent his adult life in the park, became beloved by the world, and ultimately died there. When Studio Tutto was commissioned to create one of their powerful murals for the reopening of Griffith Park’s historic welcome center, after much research and thought, their mural became “An artistic [visual] altar to the spirit of P-22 [and his last wild place].” The mandate for me in these CP LIVE experiences and interviews is to not only give voice to (as the podcast always does), but actually make visible the many diverse connections animated by the gardening impulse everywhere. What this conversation makes visible to me, and I hope to all listeners, is that gardening is a multifaceted act – it is physical, it is intellectual, it is artistic and imaginative, it is tangible, and symbolic. It is one lens and method by which we know nature, and by which we participate in the nature of the world, and the nature of ourselves. Through their larger-than-life art (or maybe it’s art trying to meet a truer scale of life’s enormity?), and the nature it brings into our view, Studio Tutto is growing, painting, and weaving the beauty of the sacred presence of nature back into everyday human places, and they are weaving humans back into nature’s places, like Griffith Park. Are artists gardening our world? These artists are. The more we see and support the incredible diversity of who Gardeners are, what they grow, and what Gardens mean, the better we grow our world. ENJOY this artful conversation with Hennessy and Sofia! *CP LIVE is a series of 10 CP conversations recorded and filmed live on the home ground of, and in support of, the cultivators of place with whom we are in conversation. These events, and the upcoming documentary series, are filmed by Myriam Nicodemus and Khoa Huyhn of EM EN in South Bend, IN. The series was made possible in part by funding from the Catto-Shaw Foundation. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.