Gardens

Garden 1. Arable land, usually fenced, on which vegetables, flowers or fruit trees are grown, in order to obtain products; 2. Plotted land (and arranged with alleys, benches, etc.) used as a recreational or decorative place (source: online explicative dictionary of Romanian language).

The garden has gone through a deep crisis in recent years, caught between the search for a new language and total oblivion. Its recent reconstructions have either had a strong social connotation, or they were condemned to decorate suburban areas of cities or to fill voids left blank after urbanization, to become pure decor, thus banal “green spaces” capable of hosting anyone and anything.
But the garden has always been a fertile ground for experiment, it is that place of interaction between the vegetal element and space, between project, implementation and above all care, an essential requirement against the current clumsy rehearsals of automatic gestures. And the private garden, anonymous and passionate, hidden to many, should become anew a source of inspiration and courage.

In a world that constantly reaches beyond its physical and political, ecological and climatic, commercial and informational boundaries, the discipline and practice of landscaping could re-start from garden and paradise, from wonder and stupor. And the return to a small-scale, high-resolution approach, typical of the garden, does not necessarily imply a closed space isolated from the rest of the world. On the contrary, the garden succeeds in establishing a spatial relationship with the surrounding landscape, opening within it distances that paradoxically manage to unite, by virtue of separation. The mission of the garden project is thus to turn distance into closeness and exterior into interior without ever betraying its intimate nature.

This brings up the idea of a garden search, exploration and mapping project in Cluj-Napoca, in order to refine their symbolic and formal complexity, contrary to the established definitions. Hidden or forgotten, young or old, both public and private gardens, shining through their ability to stimulate the senses and nurture the imagination. There will be real or imaginary transfigured gardens, decadent and exotic ones added here, a diffuse green established in recent years in studios of Cluj artists. Wonder why?

To be continued…