Image 07_Never Ending Story, Stacked log walls
of the garden is overlaid with a set of standard, hypothetical, and imagined texts that delivers multiple simultaneous readings of the process. Through aggregation a rigid controlled structure is undone by the aggregation of multiple narratives set up by the designers but assembled by the flora and the program’s responses to it. We can easily identify with this mediated experience of the environment, after all, ecology has long been transcribed for us in fiction and science. But in Unseen Nature, with the assistance of technology, can construct its own stories. While it presents a heightened awareness of the performance related mentality that pervades our society, this parcel does not pass judgment but implies coexistence of flora, man, and technology. Unlike the Descartes’ mandate for man’s mastery over the natural world represented by André Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles or Mrs.
Reford’s Naturalistic garden, which aim to control or exhibit nature, this garden expresses an “optimistic view of the contemporary environment, in which landscape, technology, infrastructure and nature … intertwine.”
Emergent Regenerative landscape designs which reconstruct ecosystem services on a site adhere to images of Arcadian ideals which we can no longer identify with. Like the English Landscape tradition, they manufacture bucolic images in park-like settings. The installation Histoire sans fin ou Le bois dans tous ses états (Never Ending Story: Ecologies of Decay) by Paris based ATELIER EEM: Marc Blume, Estelle Nicod, and Francesca Liggieri, offers an alternative image by aestheticizing the biological process articulated in the design