Notebook of Return / Carnet de Retour
An invitation to think, plant, and create across the Great Loop as part of the Toronto Biennial
By Céline Semaan & Jean-Marc Bullet
Notebook of Return is a living archive of seeds, stories, and resistance. Traversing cities along the Great Loop—from Martinique and New York to Toronto—this project unearths how Afro-diasporic and Indigenous communities cultivate memory, identity, and climate resilience through the act of gardening.
Part participatory installation, part ecological ritual, this fieldwork unfolds across North America through workshops, shared meals, seed plantings, and storytelling. Each site becomes a chapter in a collective notebook—written not in ink alone, but in soil, kinship, and ancestral knowledge.
Notebook of Return Project Description /
“This project is an evolving fieldwork of stories, seeds, and shared memory — an exploration of the ways communities along the Great Loop use gardens as sites of resistance, adaptation, and belonging. At the intersection of art and ecology, we approach the garden as both a living archive and a communal language: a place where histories are planted, where resilience takes root, and where the act of cultivation becomes a political gesture.
Guided by a red thread — a metaphor for interconnectedness across land, cultures, and displacement — we hold the notebook as a central form: a space to record encounters, to map connections, and to trace the invisible lines that tie people to place. In asking, ‘What can a seed teach us about survival, about migration, about memory?’ we begin to see that to know the seed is to know the people. And how do farming communities along the great loop take part in the fight against global warming by providing answers to their own existential problems? How can this resilience be revealed by working with seeds shared with all those communities?
Through this process, we collect evidence of life: notes, exchanges, gestures of care and kinship. This work is a collaborative attempt to archive not only what grows, but how and why — revealing the ecological and social issues communities face, and the creative ways they continue to grow, adapt, and express themselves across distance and time.”
— Jean-Marc Bullet and Céline Semaan
Why Now
In the face of displacement and ecological collapse, this work offers a radical lens: the garden as archive, the seed as knowledge, and the notebook as an instrument of return. At a time when communities are reclaiming their stories and restoring their lands, Notebook of Return brings together artists, farmers, and memory-bearers to record, protect, and share what has long been silenced.
Project Site Locations (2025–2026): Martinique, Detroit, New York, Toronto, Saint-Louis
Core Components
- Toronto Biennial Convening in November 2026 to share research and experiences, as well as a communal dinner exploring ecological resilience
- Workshops & Seed Planting Ceremonies
- Storytelling through Notebooks, Cameras & Audio
- Lunar Calendar Creation Rooted in Afro-Diasporic Time
- Handcrafted Seed Banks for Intergenerational Transmission
Participants will receive a box of tools: notebooks, seeds, film cameras, prompts; gifts offered in reciprocity. The exchange continues digitally via a Signal group, forming a real-time, translocal archive.
Featured Artists
Céline Semaan – Lebanese-born artist, designer & founder of Slow Factory, known for weaving climate justice, decolonial theory, and cultural memory into installation and design. Exhibited at MoMA PS1, de Young Museum, and CAC New Orleans.
Jean-Marc Bullet – Martinique-based industrial designer and artist whose work activates postcolonial ecologies and community rituals. “Mondes Nouveaux” and Villa Albertine Fellow.
Collaborating with:
- Allana Clarke’s Amend Garden, located in Detroit’s Little Village
- Antioch Baptist Church/Sumner High School Community Garden, as part of Counterpublic Triennial
- Mary Mattingly’s Floating Garden, as part of Medina Triennial
- Toronto Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective
