Festival | 2010 Edition
Violence of the Garden (LAND USE OBSERVATORY)
The garden is a site of conflict, of negotiation and strategies. To create and cultivate this incarnation of paradise, the destruction of the preconditions is inescapable. Furthermore, to achieve peace in the garden, growth, pests, vermin and unwanted visitors have to be fought off. Compared to the view on nature as natural and original, the garden is an unorderly condition, an illness.
The transformation of a tool into a weapon, as with the barbed wire, becomes here representative to the landscape itself as being the arena for strategies of power, of means to define and defeat. The trench, as developed during the American Civil War, outlines a definition of the unreachable, the “no mans land“. Its immanent possibility to move and create new borders and geographies reminds us of that ever-escaping ideal. Stepping down into the trench creates new perspectives. As an observatory of the realities of the garden, it forces us to further consider representations and the construction of our surroundings. Put in a context of naturalized gardening ideals, this installation might be perceived as violent, but as such, the questions of how we cultivate are brought to the table.
Architect: TOPOTEK 1 Martin Rein-Cano, Lorenz Dexler
Years of exhibition: 2010
