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MÉTIS
in situ
Antonio
Perazzi; Italie/Italy
Bleu de bois
Milanese
landscape architect Antonio Perazzi invites visitors to take
off their shoes and experience his ground-level Bleu de bois
garden to better understand his tribute to primary elements
as endless sources of garden art.
The
garden
Blue
in the woods. Blue of the sky, blue of the water recalling
the St. Lawrence, blue of the flowers evoking the Himalayan
poppy, the symbol of the historic Reford Gardens. The wood
of the trees all around the irregular clearing, the wooden
squares of water and flowers arranged in a dissolved grid,
the ground covered with a thick layer of cherry pits. Antonio
Perazzi, seeking a way of fusing his intervention with the
Métis environment, has developed a garden language
that is both highly minimalist and finely articulated.
To
respond to the power of the primordial components of the local
landscape—the sky, the sea-like river, and the forest—he
has created and applied a strict rule of three unicities.
Chromatic unicity: a single colour, blue. Material unicity:
a single material, wood. Morphological unicity: a single shape,
one-metre squares. Then, drawing inspiration from the subtle
natural harmony of the setting, he has produced a fluid mise
en scène of the elements. The blue is for reflected
water and sky or carefully arranged flowers, the wood is for
boards or cherry pits, and the square grid is like a chessboard
in the centre but dissolves around the edges.
The
ultimate goal of the composition is to convert this vision
of garden art as a tribute to the natural landscape into a
significant experience for visitors. The idea is to lead them
gently toward the essential forces present as they make their
way through this Bleu de bois interface. The squares of flowers
and water are encounters with the primordial elements and
the choice of blue as a colour is linked not only to the hue
of the sky and the River, but is also a symbol of ingenuousness.
Antonio
Perazzi was influenced by The Blue Flowers, a novel by Raymond
Queneau, and more specifically by its Italian edition, with
a preface by Italo Calvino. When he asked the author about
the enigmatic title, Calvino writes, he was told that it was
a reference to an expression (“être fleur bleue"
– being a blue flower, in other words), meaning a dreamer,
someone fresh and natural, imbued with innocence and candour.
The
designer
Antonio
Perazzi is a young Italian landscape architect, who has been
practising since 1996. He has designed a number of major private
gardens in Italy, Switzerland, the United States and Kuwait.
His office in Milan is also working on an innovative environmental
approach to landscaping thermal power stations and a stimulation
garden for Alzheimer's patients. He has created temporary
gardens for the international Ars Topiaria de Lucca exhibition
(Italy, 2001) and for the ninth edition of the Architecture
Biennale in Venice (Italy, 2000, with Franco Zagari). He has
developed a particular interest in the design of experimental
garden containers, which he has indulged at Métis in
the dissolved grid of planters and ponds set into the ground.
Maria
Goula, Anna Zahonero (Alexandre Campello, Andrew Harris, Claudia
Illanes); Catalogne/Catalonia
Summer-dry
Biologist
Anna Zahonero and architect Maria Goula, both from Catalonia,
portray the harsh realities of the Mediterranean environment
with a nuanced vision, creating a striking geometric garden
full of contrasts.
The
garden
This
garden is a radical departure from the usual logic applied
in manipulating space-time. The designers have not attempted
to capture an ideal and fleeting landscape moment, an approach
that normally means overcoming, at great expense, the resistance
by the landscape to the transformation imposed on it.
On
the contrary, the Catalonian team brought together by Maria
Goula and Anna Zahonero chose to import to Métis an
adapted and durable garden image of a persistent and challenging
reality of the Mediterranean landscape: dryness. They portray
this phenomenon by evoking its most drastic manifestation,
a forest fire, and maintain the memory of the fire by preserving
the traces it left behind.
A
series of parallel straight lines is traced in a uniform floor
of coal-black sand, just as a fire bares and reveals the right-angled
geometry of rural landscapes. Visitors walk through the site
over clearly marked, oblique trails, without touching the
ground—as if at an archaeological site.
But
parched and burned ground doesn't mean only isolation and
desolation. Once across the arid space, the visitor discovers
a straw enclosure, a reminder first of all that summer is
also harvest season. With its openings and flared shape, the
structure seems to be trying to protect its contents, to allow
the sunshine in and to channel hypothetical rain like an impluvium.
In the form of a square of potted pines, it actually holds
the promise of reforestation, testifying simultaneously to
the fragility of the landscape and the regenerating role of
fire.
Finally,
through the empty spaces of this container which, in the designers'
imagination, could have been set here and opened or even dropped
from the sky and broken apart on landing, the garden again
opens up to its surroundings. And one understands that in
rejecting the current garden design approach of importing
chaste oases from the world of dreams or idealized memories
into an often reluctant landscape, the Catalonian team has
created an expressive and significant, yet maintenance-free
piece that whisks the visitor away by exploiting the Mediterranean
features of the Métis landscape: the great blue vistas
of the river and the pine grove. And if the Gaspesian summer
brings the burned soil back to life, no one will object.
The
design team
The
Summer – Dry design team consists of biologist Anna Zahonero
and architects Maria Goula, Claudia Illanes, Andrew Harris
and Alexandre Campello. They all work at the undergraduate
or graduate level in the landscape architecture program at
the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. They are also all
involved in the Landscape Research and Project Centre at the
university, where they develop landscape design projects and
conduct scientific research into landscape and land use management.
STUDIO.EU
(Paola Cannavò, Ippolita Nicotera, Francesca Venier);
Italie/Italy
Italian Fragment
Studio.eu,
a Berlin-based firm, here represents the country of origin
of its three founders with a fragment taken from people's
favourite Italian garden? or a piece cut from the most Italian
of people's favourite gardens: the soccer field.
The
garden
The
Italian guests at Métis-sur-Méditerranée,
Paola Cannavò, Ippolita Nicotera and Francesca Venier,
elected to work on universal shapes: on the one hand, the
current and historically dominant practice of garden art as
the selection and recreation of a fragment of landscape, and
on the other hand, the figure of the stadium, an enclosure
of manicured greenery cut off from the rest of the world—the
perfect example of an unexpecting and unexpected garden.
The
designers applied the conventional method directly to the
everyday object, and the result is anything but. A rectangular
portion of a soccer field installed in the Métis landscape,
an impeccable grassy carpet marked with blindingly bright
white lines, a goal and a corner flag, all parachuted down
next to the St. Lawrence.
The
type of stadium to be represented was no accident, of course.
The Italian designers selected a fragment of a soccer field
because they wished to highlight the popular culture of their
country's landscape and share it with Festival visitors. After
all, the inhabitants of il bel paese (the beautiful country)
are endowed with a remarkable propensity to spontaneously
interpret their environment as a playing field. On Sundays
in the country or at the beach someone always brings a soccer
ball along, and a few pieces of clothing thrown on the grass
or lines traced in the sand quickly transform the space.
This
Italian Fragment is a tribute to the art of experiencing the
landscape as a playing field and an invitation to play right
then and there, but still more. It is an opportunity to reflect
on the environmental consequences of over-commercialization
of outdoor activities. For this tendency to use the landscape
as a playground can be dangerous when it is applied at an
industrial scale, as it uses up phenomenal quantities of resources
essential to environmental balance. Accordingly, in one corner,
the green rectangle is lifted up to reveal the secret of its
eternal greenness: the water it heedlessly consumes. Visitors
will be offered the choice of drinking or watering.
And
while the undulations in the ground are there to invite visitors
to stretch out and enjoy the landscape, they also cannot fail
to evoke the pleasant arrangement of the golf course, that
North American equivalent of the soccer field as a consumer
of water. Finally, the structure of the goal jutting out of
the fragment serves as a frame for a view of the landscape
and sets a clear objective: learn to delight in nature while
preserving it.
The
designers
Architects
Paola Cannavò, Ippolita Nicotera and Francesca Venier
represent their native country, Italy, at the Festival. They
graduated between 1993 and 1997, two of them in Rome and the
third in Milan, and all settled in Berlin when they completed
their studies. Their paths converged even more at that point,
as they developed a joint multidisciplinary practice, collaborating
on projects carried out by Stefan Tischer's landscape architecture
firm. In June 2000, they founded Studio.eu, their architectural,
urban and landscape design practice, working in both Germany
and Italy.
Siham
Ben Sari; Maroc/Morocco
O Hendiya
The
Moroccan guest at the Festival has organized a celebration
at Métis in honour of the huge and prickly Hendiya,
a misunderstood plant in Morocco. The tribute takes the form
of a contemporary interpretation of the traditional Islamic
garden of paradise.
The
garden
Siham
Ben Sari, the Moroccan representative at the Mediterranean
edition of the Festival, plays skilfully on the theme of international
horticultural relations, to create a meaningful yet essentially
sensual garden. She was trained in landscape architecture
at the Université de Montréal, and is taking
the opportunity of her return trip to North America to make
amends for the unjust treatment in Morocco of a plant imported
from Mexico in the 19th century, by creating a fragrant showcase
inspired by the age-old model of the sacred Moroccan residential
garden.
The
Hendiya has indeed received a frosty welcome quite out of
keeping with the legendary Moroccan tradition of hospitality.
This massive plant has been valued there mainly for its exceptional
hardiness and sharp thorns, and used most often as a daunting
fence around farmland and slums. But Siham Ben Sari feels
that these uses not only insult the beauty of its fleshy oval
leaves, the charms of its tasty fruit and its unusual flowers,
but also, given the growing drought in the country, overlook
the remarkable environmental value of a perfectly adapted
plant.
This
highly evocative concept is the source of a powerful garden
narrative bringing the culture, colours and fragrances of
the Mediterranean face of Morocco to Métis. The designer
in fact rewrites the story of how the Hendiya arrived in her
country. She first has the creatures of the desert dancing
in long elegant beds undulating on the waves of a great blue
stony sea. The city is in view, in the form of a fabric enclosure.
To the welcoming sound of youyous, the now-appreciated plant
makes its triumphant entrance and, with the visitor, is immediately
projected into the sacred order of a riyad garden.
Siham
Ben Sari's O Hendiya borrows the enclosed section from the
riyad, the traditional Moroccan residence giving onto a courtyard
laid out according to the immutable model of the Islamic garden
of paradise. Representing the unchanging rivers of water,
milk, wine and honey described in the Koran, four alleys divide
the square into quarters where Hendiyas rule over beds of
deliciously aromatic plants, behind welcoming gasaâts,
large shallow dishes bearing candles and rose petals. This
is all set against a backdrop of oranges, lemons, bougainvillea
flowers and fig leaves, in which the most venerated Moroccan
plants have given way to the thorny Mexican immigrant and
offer it a superb protective enclosure. It is a feast for
the senses, to be savoured in its centre under the soft filter
of a white canopy-style tent.
The
designer
Siham
Ben Sari is a young Moroccan creator who studied landscape
architecture and interior design at the Faculty of Environmental
Design of the Université de Montréal, from 1993
to 1998. She then worked in landscape design in Quebec and
France before returning to her native country in 2000, where
she also practises her other specialty, interior design. In
2002, in Casablanca, she founded L'Agave bleu, her landscape
and interior design firm. She draws on her multidisciplinary
and international training and practice in her contemporary
interpretation of the riyad garden, presented at Métis-sur-Méditerranée
in honour of a plant imported to Morocco from Mexico.
EKIP
(Thierry Beaudoin, Sinisha Brdar, Patrick Morand, Marc Pape);
Québec, Canada
Parallaxe Boogie-woogie
An
updated, chaotic 3D tubular trellis version of the timeless
theme of the labyrinth, by four young Quebec designers. Unfathomable
parallax effect guaranteed, and boogie-woogie option available.
The
garden
The
maze fashioned by ekip is a metaphor for the contemporary
human condition, its complexities and anxieties. It reinterprets
the inextricable networks, chaotic flows and hyperactivity
of contemporary society in the form of a playground, a place
where one can escape reason.
The
labyrinth is laid out as a rectangle, a simple and universal
rational shape that betrays the artificiality of the garden,
as does its uniform mineral green soil. A three-dimensional
assembly of tubes forming a free, dynamic and chaotic composition
makes up the body of the maze and defines the paths through
it, while at the same time remaining permeable and ambiguous.
This abstract shape reflects and absorbs some of the perceptible
components of the site (creek, path, trees, stones, etc.).
The discreet entrance and exit are set at a tangent to the
structure. Its overall green colour helps it blend into the
setting and disorients the visitor. The ground, tubes and
plants combine to form a relatively monochromatic whole. Thus
Parallaxe Boogie-Woogie introduces a rapprochement at Métis
between the culture of networks and the imaginary world of
the maple, rhizomes and roots.
The
opacity of a traditional labyrinth is replaced by transparency,
and this is what creates the parallax effect. The vertigo
comes first from the elusive character of the structure. The
visitor tries in vain to pin down the image as it constantly
sidesteps away. The “Boogie-woogie" aspect comes
from the way everything is in constant motion, inviting the
viewer to join the dance, to leave the path and cross through
the walls. For walking and climbing are in fact the two complementary
ways of exploring this maze of emptiness and views.
Eight
plant, mineral and architectural events organized for the
occasion serve as strange lures, dotted along the exploratory
path and acting as anchors of specific experiences of different
places. As visitors approach these elements, they are invited
to climb, to look at themselves, to contemplate, play, gaze
down, communicate the plants used in the composition are engaged
in a morphological and chromatic dialogue with the labyrinth,
which itself echoes the maze of spruce trees bordering the
site and introducing a dialogue between trunks and tubes.
But
modern Reason brought with it the rule of straight lines and
clarity, and the fascinating idea of the maze, suddenly undesirable,
took refuge ? in the garden. There it tamed the forest, often
considered a symbol of evil and danger, and transformed this
hostile manifestation of nature into an organized game. In
the meantime, other entanglements have come to haunt us, and
ekip's Parallaxe Boogie-woogie appropriately extends the garden
maze tradition by weaving a powerful network of correspondences
with this tradition, our contemporary demons and its site.
All in the shape of a playful, liberating garden that one
discovers by instinct. As designers Thierry Beaudoin, Sinisha
Brdar, Patrick Morand and Marc Pape would chorus, “Let's
boogie!"
The
designers
The
four members of ekip (a play on the French word for “team")
graduated from the architecture program at the Université
de Montréal in 1997 and 1998. Two of them are now working
for Montreal architecture firms: Thierry Beaudoin with Atelier
Big City and Marc Pape with Saïa et Barbarese. Sinisha
Brdar is also working as an architect, with Public Works and
Government Services Canada in Ottawa. Patrick Morand pursued
his training in Switzerland, where he studied graphic design,
and now practises it with the Dixsept studio. Together they
created ekip, an informal association that they like to describe
as a “Collective open to the exploration and exchange
of ideas on design, architecture and contemporary society
".
Stefan
Tischer; Québec, Canada
Homme-nature-jardin
A
delectable and revealing exercise in deconstructing garden
references; the garden is fragmented, scattered and replaced
in context, and confronts visitors with instruments for measuring
the oversized concept of garden art.
The
garden
Asking
the eternal question underlying the garden art—the relationship
between man and nature—in a sensitive way, to make it
accessible to the vast Festival audience. That is the ambitious
creative project taken on by internationally renowned landscape
architect Stefan Tischer, originally from Germany and now
the Director of the School of Landscape Architecture at the
Université de Montréal.
The
expressive reflection begins with an artistic questioning
on the notion of territory. Where are the boundaries of this
garden, which is anything but an isolated object? Homme-nature-jardin
straddles the Festival promenade, slides into the woods twice
rather than just once, stretches inland and slides along the
slope of the cliff and into the St. Lawrence. And Stefan Tischer
is careful not to leave any form of natural enclosure closed:
through the woods and past the brook, he opens up views onto
the environment in every direction, taking in the coast, the
forest, the festival and farmland.
In
this way he has updated the ideal of turning the territory
into an art form, an approach that has underlain garden and
landscaping practices since their most distant origins, and
is clearly expressed in the canonical French and English garden
models. Like the standardized elements of a modular fence
that has exploded, a series of identical doorways marching
from the River right up to the fallow land picks up on the
idea of an unlimited garden in a way that at the same time
evokes one of its historic forms: a picturesque-style composition
made up of successive tableaux.
For
the metallic structures are the backdrop for an exhibition
of photographs of human gazes, colossal black and white close-ups
of faces. The fascinating interplay of scales and contrasts
is meant to be explored from the countless fragments of paths
laid out in a continuous green flow, so that one can once
again take the measure of the oversized concept of garden
art.
The
designer
Landscape
architect Stefan Tischer did most of his training at the Technical
University of Munich, in Germany. Starting in 1992, he launched
a very successful landscaping design practice in his native
country and in Italy, while at the same time working extensively
as a teacher, lecturer, critic and researcher on the international
stage (United States, Italy, Morocco and elsewhere). He has
won a number of major competitions, and his research and creations
have been widely published and exhibited. He is also one of
the designers of Topos, a European landscape architecture
magazine. Since 2002, he has been the Director of the School
of Landscape Architecture at the Université de Montréal.
Christopher
Bruce Matthews, Taco Iwashima;
Etats-Unis/United States
The You are Here Garden
Inspired
by the highly civilized setting of Métis-sur-mer, designers
Christopher Bruce Matthews and Taco Iwashima present a meditation
on the notion of place in a era of hyper-domestication of
the environment. A creation from the 2002 Festival, held over
in response to public and critical acclaim.
The
garden
Are
we really here in Métis when we are here? And then
again, where are we really when we are here? These are the
questions asked by The You Are Here Garden, an expression
of the designers' reflection on how tourists relate to the
places they visit. And indeed, where are we exactly when we
consider a place with our holidayers' open minds, nonetheless
programmed by what we read in our guide books? For Christopher
Bruce Matthews and Taco Iwashima, that typical dot on a tourist
map stating “You are here" is representative of
this abstract place visited by tourists.
The
major modern-day attraction of Métis-sur-mer as a tourist
venue, i.e. its cultural history as a summer resort, itself
transported from a mythical Scotland, suggested another reference
for their Festival garden. This is the classic “Wish
you were here" postcards, symptomatic of tourists' sense
of foreignness in the nonetheless hyper-civilized places where
they buy such cards.
Playing
on these two references, Matthews and Iwashima present a mise
en scène of a patch of wild meadow cut from a nearby
site and literally transplanted, to be replaced in its original
location after the Festival. Visitors are initially greeted
by a postcard box set before a monumental postcard-shaped
entrance curtain with a photograph of the original site printed
on it. They then pass through a filter of suspended tapes
printed with “You are here," obscuring the view
ahead, before coming upon two non-sites set in this labyrinth.
The
main destination of this amusing, unsettling groping through
the abstract setting is a rectangular outdoor room where the
patch of transplanted wild meadow is surrounded by a picket
fence. Here, visitors will look much more closely at the foreign
patch of meadow than they ever would have in its original
site. Three Adirondack chairs invite them to meditate on the
contemporary experience of sites and, particularly, landscapes.
A fourth chair is hidden elsewhere in the garden, so that
they can prolong their reflections in a sort of landscape
isolation chamber.
The
designers
Christopher
Bruce Matthews is a landscape architect originally from Britain,
and Taco Iwashima, a specialist in environmental graphics
of Japanese nationality. They worked together for years in
Japan for Tokyo Landscape Architects, and today are based
in the United States. They have worked with architects Tadao
Ando and Toyo Ito and produced a number of highly acclaimed
temporary creations, including a garden of the natural elements
for the first Chaumont-sur-Loire garden festival (France,
1992), a Zen dandelion garden for the Kyoto Art Fair (Japan,
1998) and a working scarecrow garden for the Tsumari Echigo
Triennale (Niigita, Japan, 2000).
SE
BUSCA (Michele Adrian, Paula Meijerink); États-Unis/United
States
Asphalt Garden
A
daring and vertigo-inducing garden reconciling myriad juxtapositions:
The Se Busca duo has set down a delightful paved and flooded
yard in the midst of the woods, complete with a row of truck
tires emerging from the water.
The
garden
It
is a magnified clearing and a highway at the same time, it
is black and it is transparent, it is a reflection yet we
can walk and sit on it, it is a mirror-like pool of water
and the paved-over surface of a parking lot, it is a river
ford or a foot bath, it is an amusement park and an ornamental
pond, it is a puddle of water on an ill-drained roadway and
a magical garden. With their Asphalt Garden, Michele Adrian
and Paula Meijerink extend the immemorial tradition of the
garden as a place of mediation between people and their environment.
The
situation has been reversed, however. In a time when the landscape
is being totally humanized, here it is no longer the wild
world that is tamed and civilized by gardeners, but rather
the highway jungle, the planetary proliferation of asphalted
surfaces and associated signage, that the designers have sought
to make more amenable to the natural environment. The Se Busca
team shows a marked interest in ordinary landscapes as characteristic
expressions, as trivial as they may be, of contemporary culture.
Asphalt
is a paving material as universal as it is condemned, a perfect
challenge for anyone looking to awaken visitors' awareness
of an oft-ignored fact of modern life. Starting from a poetic
vision of the urban puddle as a magic screen (the moon reflected
in a ditch, architecture mirrored on the sidewalk), the designers
actually manage to merge opposites: the evergreen forest of
Métis with the flat asphalt space marked by graphic
signs and the ornamental ponds of ceremonial gardens.
Playing
on the black opacity of asphalt contrasting with the clear
transparency of water, on their respective abilities to absorb
or reflect light, on the steadfast immobility of one and the
shifting fluidity of the other, the garden succeeds in melting
into the woods until we are not sure where one ends and the
other begins. The dissolved boundaries are further confused
by a series of lines immersed in and emerging from the water,
introducing visitors to the essential playful dimension of
the garden.
The
yellow lines of this road gone wrong, seeking refuge in the
forest, actually form a route that invites visitors to try
crossing the garden dry-footed or to take off their shoes
and wade through the water. Similarly, the line of truck tires
allow visitors to sit calmly and dabble their feet in the
water, or to hop adventurously from one to the other. Finally,
another playful touch of this rush-hour victim turned green
is way that the giant standardized letters in STOP and ONLY
are mixed up to form LOLLYPOP and SPY. All in all, it is a
good use of asphalt, a material the designers consider one
of the most decisive liberating inventions for 20th-century
culture.
The
designers
Michele
Adrian is a Venezuelan architect and Paula Meijerink is a
landscape architect from the Netherlands. Both of them work
in the Boston region, and consider Asphalt Garden an expression
of their intercontinental cultural vision, in that it combines
the forest of Métis, the essence of Venezuela, i.e.
oil, and the essence of the Netherlands, water. They and several
partners originally created Se Busca to develop a specific
landscape project in Caracas. Today the team consists of three
members (including Miguel Divo) and continues to work in Venezuela,
with projects in the United States and the Netherlands as
well.
Marc
Böhlen, Natalie Tan; Ontario, Canada
Unseen
Artist
and engineer Marc Böhlen and architect Natalie Tan turn
their combined artistic and scientific gaze on Métis
nature, to give us a better view of its composition and our
image of it.
The
garden
In
these times of intensive and extensive arrangement of nature,
affecting not only the land but also all the lakes and rivers
and life forms that depend on it, the forest covering almost
half of Quebec turns out to be a controlled territory, just
as the city is. Starting from this observation, Natalie Tan
and Marc Böhlen have designed a garden that expresses
this situation and takes the opportunity to bring us up to
date on the flora and fauna of the Gaspé Peninsula.
At
first glance, the opening in the woods appears to have been
naturally colonized by wildflowers, ringed by ferns and other
understorey plants that create a link between the clearing
and the forest. In fact, this is all simply a methodical outdoor
system for taking a plant inventory.
Eight
parallel beds showcase wild plants typical of the local ecosystem,
some indigenous and related to Native cultures, some brought
here by European colonists. They are arranged by height to
form rising steps surrounded by paths, and labelled and presented
in mathematical alignment in pots of different sizes, depending
on the specific rooting and space needs of each.
The
key to this enigmatic open-air catalogue is a hybrid observation
post in the heart of the installation, combining the traditional
function of a garden bench with that of a technological interface
with the environment. At first sight it is a reassuring and
welcoming setting for rest and contemplation, open on three
sides and offering a view of the woods. This assembly of commonplace
products from the forestry industry offers ample seating around
a giant planter. Once this first impression fades, however,
visitors are once again confronted with a somewhat disturbing
conception of the garden.
For
they find a station for processing and transmitting information
gathered in the plant beds by a monitoring device. Exactly
like everyday life in the city, and especially like the slightest
movement in our parking lots, all plant and animal activity
is being systematically recorded. The recorded images are
then analyzed and combined with scientific commentary from
a stand-alone computer. Throughout the summer, the system
will be compiling an electronic narration of the slow, invisible
processes in progress and of daily micro-events.
The
designers
Natalie
Tan holds a master's degree in architecture from the National
University of Singapore. After interning in architecture in
Los Angeles and then in Singapore, she settled in Toronto
as an independent designer in 2002. With Daniel Karpinski,
she designed a proposal for a multifunctional complex as part
of a prestigious shipyard conversion project in Gdansk, Poland.
Marc Böhlen is an artist, art historian and engineer,
trained in Switzerland and the United States. He teaches university
courses and conducts research into technological and media
art, a field that corresponds to his own artistic practice.
Since 2001, Natalie Tan and Marc Böhlen have been working
together on anti-utilitarian projects imbued with an optimistic
vision of the contemporary environment and aimed at synthesizing
landscape, technology, infrastructure and nature.
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