A garden terrace high above Lake Lugano. Walking in a forest garden. Autumn leaves fall. Tree stumps decay. The real ones, at snail pace over 12,000 years. The other artificial ones, within half a garden season. Nature and culture fuse, in and with time. Architectural exhibitions are normally indoors, but in this case, a garden is turned into an installation and interpretation space.
The installation plays with an enchanted garden in Ticino, using it as a projection space for yearnings and clichés. It is based on the astoundingly universal message conveyed by the image of sawn-off tree stumps. Nature – wild, glorified, tamed and transplanted to the environs of a villa – meets the garden – domesticated, transient and overgrown.
Leaves tremble, quietly audible in a delicate forest of two-year-old poplar stalks, not yet a forest, but no longer a garden. Archaic stumps lie between slender trunks. The stumps lay in a clay pit in Zurich for thousands of years, before returning to daylight and back to the aerobic process of decomposition during an excavation for a building. Concrete casts of similar stumps now populate the Rütliwiese as tables and benches. They reappear in the villa garden as crafted papier-maché artefacts. Images of Landscape Architecture projects from the office of Studio Vulkan can be viewed on the cut surfaces.
A haptic confrontation is created between living natural images frozen at the moment of recording and concrete abstracted natural images. Wood stain is used to delay the decomposition process of the papier-maché stumps for the duration of the exhibition. The outcome of the process is open.
Landscape Architecture can be described as transient building. It is focused on nature, its perception and interpretation. The installation seeks new perspectives. They are all that remains of the exhibition, documented as snapshots of change and decay.
Location: i2a, istituto internazionale di architettura, Portich da Sura 18, Vico Morcote, Switzerland
Period: October 2013–May 2014
Landscape: Studio Vulkan
Photography: Studio Vulkan, Daniela Valentini
Walking in the garden, in the woods
Landscape Architecture can be described as transient building. It is focused
on nature, its perception and interpretation. The installation seeks new perspectives.
They are all that remains of the exhibition, documented as snapshots of change and decay.
„ Unkommentiert stehen sich unterschiedlichste Erscheinungsbilder der Natur gegenüber.
Erzeugen atmosphärisch eigenständige Bilder. Zwischen den Bildern spannt sich der Interpretationsraum auf.“
Robin Winogrond
„ There is something in the nature of nature, in its presentness, its seeming transience, its creative ferment and hidden potential, that corresponds very closely with the wild, or green man, in our psyches; and it is a something that disappears as as it relegated (…) a status of merely classifiable thing.“
John Fowles
„Das Leben in der Wildnis bedeutet nicht nur in der Sonne sitzen und Beeren essen.
Ich sehe es viel eher als eine «Tiefenökologie», die Zugang zur dunklen Seite der Natur hat –
und das Gewölle aus zerschlagenen Knochen im Dreck, die Federn im Schnee, die Geschichten
von unstillbarem Hunger. Wilde Systeme stehen in einem herausgehobenen Sinn über der Kritik,
aber man kann sie auch für irrational, muffig, schimmlig, grausam, parasitär halten.“
Gary Snyder