A group show with Jakob Francisco, Junya Fujita, Jaewon Kim, Eliška Konečná, Sophia Leitenmayer, Rosa Lüders, Genevieve Lotus, Clarisse Pillard, Charlie Spiegelfeld, Kastania Waldmüller, Sudabe Yunesi.

2025

A garden is a place of ambiguity – some people think of food, some think of flowers. I tend to think of the acres and acres of meadows and slopes turned into production chains, as arable land becomes a source. Gardening and agriculture may not be the same, but they both share the violent act of determining what a land ought to be. Gardening, be it botany or agriculture, fundamentally opposes the idea of wilderness (itself determined by a notion of rule), inasmuch as it starts with an act of taming and dominance, often meaning destruction. The coffee industry, for instance: rainforests or impenetrable thickness razored by narrow pathways, gentle slopes, and white flowers – trade monopolies, lush green, armed resistance, greed, layered canopies, stocks. Or the idea of crop rotation, fallow, and functional rest, to put it more simply. 

Agriculture, in particular, has long played a pivotal role in different methods of invasion. Saint Helena’s inhospitable vegetation - where Napoleon exiled, allegedly believing that he was still ruling over Europe - was first tamed through agriculture, for example. First, the Portuguese planted a chapel. Then trees followed, then cattle, until a permanent settlement was established. The strategy did not differ much from the one that led to massive clearings of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, as the coffee industry took off, or from the sheep the Danish used to clear out the Faroes. Fencing is most likely the epitome of such endeavor. Originally used to keep livestock captive, it turned into a form of marking property, demarking land as ownership, a title gloriously embodied by barbed wire.

Either way, the vision is old. As Wikipedia attests, “the single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is control.” Indeed, the etymology of the word ‘gardening’ essentially goes back to a notion of walled enclosure, a conception strangely close to the notion of "paradise", also referred to as a sort of walled enclosure, from the Ancient Greek parádeisos (παράδεισος), which stemmed from Old Iranian, itself derived from the Proto-Iranian ‘parādaiĵah’, again ‘walled enclosure', in its turn derived from the Old Persian 𐎱𐎼𐎭𐎹𐎭𐎠𐎶 (p-r-d-y-d-a-m, /paridaidam/, a variation of the Avestan 𐬞𐬀𐬌𐬭𐬌 ‘pairi-daêza-‘, to the Persian فردوس (ferdaws, or ‘paradise’, ‘heaven’). Ultimately, paradise seems to be perceived as a place of domination. What was there before, though? – before the kings and the clearings, the package and the shipping, the high?

This tension between destruction and redemption is probably the tension Kant sought to unpack in his ‘Critique of Judgment’ as he argued that the beauty of plants is free. Freedom, in this case, means that any conception of usefulness or interest is irrelevant, for freedom holds independently of one’s judgment. That is also the main reason why Kant holds gardens as one of the highest forms of beauty (§45), as they combine natural beauty and human design, or better said human sovereignty over free beauty, as I’d put it (he calls it ‘reason over nature’, or ‘the morally good’). Versailles, I believe, is a great example of this project, with its 2,000 acres of trimmed and tamed forestry – a whole garden built in perspective to feed a gaze axed on a throne, the dictator’s room on top of the hill, right in the middle, a royal figure painted on the ceiling, strategically placed as a sun. 

The bond between power and botany is vast. Palm branches, for instance, have long been associated with victory, most likely due to their capacity to endure dry environments. Nowadays, you will see them everywhere, from airports to monasteries, from resorts to border crossings. On the other hand, the agency of plants themselves usually reveals the hollowness of control. It’s funny, actually – urban trees repeatedly break the concrete and develop roots at the surface because they do not have space to grow underneath, revealing how the space for their roots was not cared for in the first place. Palm trees are particularly prone to sickness. In the architecture of power, there is often a discrepancy between the canopy and the vein, the surface and the soil. But as much as domination is a project that also encompasses the invisible, rotting, just like blooming, can rarely be contained. 

What if we could plant golden tomatoes, glowing purple passionfruit, juicy mangoes everywhere, cold plums, and apricots all year long? We can’t. And yet maybe it is in this lack of capacity that the ultimate garden lies. For if the fruit only lasts as an image, a myth, then does not that mean that decay holds the path to a new beginning? Maybe vice blooms unwillingly, its flower but a spore wherein lies remission, a new scent announcing a seed. There is also something about a garden being inaccessible, somewhat hidden. The garden of the Hesperides, for instance. Popol Vuh, Eden, Jannah. And then that song by Madonna, In My Secret Garden - the “looking for the perfect flower, waiting for my finest hour” -, the opening of Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild. Do we dream of ourselves beyond ourselves, roaming free, as we dream of a garden? Is there moss, velvet green? 

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There is a place where none of that matters, full of webs, millipedes, and doves. We drill the walls, avoiding each other as if hiding in silence, but in the end, it can’t be fenced. A cold metal sheet hits the warmth of a limb. You say that sometimes it feels that, for a minute, you don’t feel like yourself. I am about to respond but then I forget. Maybe it snowed. Suddenly it’s all labyrinths, spontaneous flowers, bees and wind kisses, a golden ebb, fresh and yet hot. We drill the walls again, the chairs resting over the branches. Red scents, slow molasses – cactus music, glass melting, amber hues in frosted grass. How long will it take for new gardens to glow? What type of trees will then grow? Will they be chestnuts or willows? Your lips smack: (                          ). Mountains grow, whelks grow. It smells of coffee once again. 

written for ‘GARDEN’