That, which we call a Garden, 2023.

Depending on where you are in the world, planting gardens will have a very different position in the scale of priorities for urban development. This small exhibition is the result of inviting several international artists to create work about their relationship with gardens. What is it within our ideas and uses of gardens that makes people crave them or reject them? And which of those ideas brings us closer to other cultures?

Solares is the word that many Colombians use for the greenery at the back of houses: unpaved, productive, and ornamental gardens. The word could be translated as “Solars” and understood as where the sunny part of the house is. But Los Solares, as the works of Katherin Gutierrez and Pablo López show, are also spaces of family bonding and remembrance, which have been slowly disappearing from Colombian urban environments due to neo-liberal politics that make space and care-time scarce. For them, the remaining Solares are places of belonging, intergenerational knowledge sharing, and heritage. Gutierrez shares with us the process of remembering her grandparent’s Solar, and how these memories are mediated by technology in the absence of a physical connection. López, on the other hand, uses drawing as his research tool to deepen the knowledge his Solar has to offer while at the same time finding those generational connections that were lost.

Growing up in the dense metropolis of Hong Kong and now living in Leipzig in a shared flat, Denise Lee’s relationship with gardening is often a question of how to find space for it within limits, as well as how to create a space of solace with plants. This piece looks at the role plants and gardens play in compact and urban spaces, as well as how growing food has been approached in urban spaces in the two cities.

In his work about growing up with a yard in the United States, Stefan Lesueur points to the formative role gardens have in a child. In his work, the yard is the stage for a child’s imagination and safe self-discovery.

23.09.2023 

Herderplatz, Wemar, Germany

In the framework of the Fest der Möglichkeiten by Zukunftscampus