One Day I'll Have A Garden Like This Too

One Day I’ll Have A Garden Like This Too, is an immersive, multisensory project, which examines gardens as spaces of knowledge, memory, connections, empathy and sharing. It is initially inspired by my mother’s garden and the profound feeling of aliveness I feel there.

One Day, I was daydreaming in her garden. As my mind was travelling between memories, thoughts, and hopes, I suddenly realised that past, present, and future were merging and had the curious sensation that time stood still. I could feel, hear, smell, taste, and touch everything. In a lulling slowness, my mother’s garden appeared to me as a giant organism governed by patience. I felt part of a whole.

Following this experience, I started exploring the temporal expression of gardens. Questioning the fast-paced western way of living, I see gardens as favourable sites to break for a moment the constant flow of everyday life and give an opportunity for consciousness. The project I created, aims to slow down the pace of the audience, offer a sense of “rootedness” and a moment of harmony and well-being. Using the sense of sight, hearing and smell, the installation awakens people’s memories of moments spent in gardens and, more generally, nature. I rethink and challenge Western’s culture-nature dualism and wish for the public to feel like it is part of an ecosystem rather than being a visitor.

The linen and knitted wool tree are dyed with plants, which can be found in my mother’s garden (madder roots, birch barks, ivies, goldenrods, etc.).

On each linen I embroidered a spiral made of electrically conductive cable. Operating thanks to the interaction between a magnetic field and electric current, the spirals emit sound and turn into speakers. The public can therefore hear a text in tribute to my mother’s garden, narrating my sensory reminiscences.

Finally, a perfume evoking my mother’s garden, made from essential oils, emanates from a diffuser. To create it, I first spent several days in her garden, noting the different scents I could smell. Then, I selected the oils and made a concoction that was closest to the perceived odours. The perfume is composed of several «notes» that the public can smell throughout the day, thus echoing the passage of time.