Join us for Jardineros with Michelle Franco Next Tuesday, June 16!

The public is invited to a screening of Jardineros, the film by Michelle A. Franco with partners TERREMOTO and Reed Hilderbrand: Tuesday, June 16 at 12:00 pm at 130 Bishop Allen Drive, Third Floor, Cambridge, MA. 

Michelle will be joining us in person. The event is open to the public and lunch will be provided, so please do invite friends.  The film is 45 minutes following by Q&A with Michelle, Stephanie, Nuith and Jaime. To RSVP or for more information, please write to Stephanie Hsia, stephanieh@reedhilderbrand.com. 

In Spanish, jardineros refers to the immigrant gardeners and groundskeepers that tend and maintain landscapes across the United States. But here, Jardineros means all of us who are tasked with the cultivation of our world of work: landscape architects and designers, contractors, academics, students, and of course, laborers. Jardineros honors the contributions of Mexican and Central American laborers who construct and maintain landscapes, and whose skilled labor is the foundation of architectural practice in the U.S.

The research entails experimental collaborations between landscape designers and landscape laborers. In this collective project, we re-envision established means and methods of design practice, and dream of new models of working that invite co-creation with builders and gardeners. We invite you to take these ideas with you. Work in Progress is the distillation of efforts from the research project and available for download.

Jardineros was originally exhibited at Knowlton School of Architecture's Banvard Gallery from April 7, 2025–July 31, 2025. The exhibition featured five short films, photographs, drawings, and documents, a selection of which can be viewed online, here. The films have subsequently been screened at Rome Studio (New Orleans, LA), The Lyric Cinema (Fort Collins, CO), LABASH (Columbus, OH), and the Boston Society of Landscape Architects annual conference (Boston, MA).