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Hortus Doppelgänger
Andrea Soto Morfin
The forest is a place of fiction and tales, it is a place of fear, where things happen that you don’t see and you don’t know about. The Forest of Lines is a science fiction experiment in a way. —Amelia Douglas, “A Forest of Lines: An Interview with Pierre Huyghe”1 La Saison des Fêtes and Forest of Lines are two nearly twin gardens that, though both created by Pierre Huyghe, behave in different ways. Their personalities are almost opposite. One is obscure, mysterious, chaotic, and rebellious. The other is rational, objective, and symbolic. Each garden has its own enclosure, evoking the typology of the hortus conclusus. The art space is not only in the garden, or in the architecture that shelters the garden, but exactly in the silent void that exists in the dialogue between art, nature, and architecture. The doppelgänger could also be understood as an idea of duality: a duality of the interior space that pulls you out and up into the sky, or pulls you down into the ground. The materiality of each building also reflects a duality: tectonic and stereotomic, the material of one building speaks of a lighter system made of a steel-bolted structure; the other structure, heavy and underground, is made of thick brick walls, in relation to a topographical mound as a preexistence in the site. This mound, at more than 20 meters high, is the most prominent element. It could also begin to resemble a funerary mound, but immediately we can tell that this mound is different, industrial, unnatural; it is rough and made of debris and wasted material.
1
Amelia Douglas, “A Forest of Lines: An Interview with Pierre Huyghe,” EMAJ: Electronic Melbourne Art Journal 1, no. 3 (2008): 1–7.