Positions out of space 2014 A walk in a garden in a forest.A garden terrace high above Lake Lugano. Autumn leaves fall, tree stumps decay – some change naturally, slowly over 12,000 years, while others decay artificially within just half a garden’syearly cycle. Nature and culture dissolve into each other, in and with time. A garden transformed into a space for installation and interpretation in a place usually reserved for architectural exhibitions.
The installation plays on the enchanted Ticino garden as a projection of desires and clichés, sending out a surprisingly universal message through images of sawed-off tree stumps. Nature – wild, inspired, tamed – transplanted into the environment surrounding the villa, uniting with the garden – subdued, transient, savaged.
Leaves tremble softly yet audibly in the delicate high-growing forest of two-year-old poplars; no longer a forest or garden, except for the perimeter that define the greenery within – a garden by definition. Between the poplar trunks are archaic stumps, preserved for thousands of years in a clay pit in Zurich before they were excavated, brought back to the light of day and returned to the aerobic decaying process. Today, concrete casts of similar stumps are used as tables and benches in the Rütli meadow; handmade papier-mâché stumps litter the villa garden. Images of landscape architectural projects have been applied to the surfaces, lively yet frozen in the moment of capture; concrete and abstract images of nature providing optical contrast. A glaze slows the decay process of the papier-mâché stumps over the duration of the exhibition. The final result is unknown.
Landscape architecture is the building of the ephemeral. Nature, its awareness and interpretation, is the subject. The installation looks for new viewpoints, documenting change and decay in snapshots – the only thing that will remain after the exhibition.
