Gardens on display

With garden exhibitions, it may somehow seem possible to stop time, to fix an image, to return to a past whose authority is recognised in order to simulate a duration that is impossible in reality. There are many attempts to ‘frame’ and display a world that remains impregnable and in constant flux, just think of the ideal models of the different garden ‘types’ belonging exclusively to the dominant geography, exhibited in Florence in 1931 with the evident political objective of reviving the splendour of the ‘Italian garden’, or the ‘real’ thematic gardens set up on the occasion of major international exhibitions, or – finally – the more recent visions, which have been able to stage the garden as an ideal meeting place of nature, art and science, of ethics, aesthetics and social sharing.

Natural inclination 2022 starts here, presenting the results of the research For a curatorial garden project, which will be the focus of the first event, and then continues the reflection by proposing an inversion of the gaze to move from garden exhibitions to what gardens show and can inspire, in their condition suspended between being the privileged place of an individual human adventure and the microcosm that refers to and lives in the planetary dimension, and that of the planet reveals the amazing biological mechanisms and connections between living beings while showing its unstoppable crisis.

Some gardens emblematic of this tension punctuate the programme: that of Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, the grey pebble garden between the sea and the nuclear power station, built and much loved by film director Derek Jarman in his last months of life, whose alienating beauty inspired the compositions of the album I Should Have Been a Gardener; that of Compton House (Groombridge Place in Kent, in reality), in which a decadent and at times grotesque aristocracy moves, whose murky plots will be revealed by the garden itself, in a captivating exchange between reality and representation (The Mysteries of Compton House Garden); and, finally, the invisible gardens, those that may ‘have no paths or pavements but only plants, animals, insects, ideas and more plants’. (SZ)