Gardens and gardeners. Variations on the theme.
edition 2025, march-april
What is a garden today? What makes a garden a garden? What does it mean to make a garden and devote oneself to its care?
Questions such as these inspired the authors of the three featured films who, by questioning the idea (or non-idea) of a garden and a gardener today, actually tell us about the way we inhabit the Earth.
Amidst more or less tidy flowerbeds, century-old trees, wild flowers, migrant and ruderal plants, weeds and dwarfs, an image of the garden emerges that is very different from the traditional one of a protected and orderly sphere of domesticated, dusted and perfect nature.
What takes shape is the idea of a space, metaphorical and real at the same time, of welcome, of cultivation and care, of direct experience and interaction with nature, of ecological and social relations, of well-being and beauty, of civic activism.
A place that is ideally always open and is based on a design culture founded first and foremost on knowledge of and respect for the living world in its entirety and complexity.
Recognising the garden as a model of aesthetic, ecological and social resistance is certainly nothing new, but in the light of the current climate crisis, now more than ever it would be important to give substance to this message and act, each for his or her part, committing to a constructive dialogue between science, ethics, civic commitment and creativity, to make, care for and inhabit gardens.
