Your Embodied Garden

Artist Statement

In February 2011, I visited the Master of Nets and the Lingering Gardens, two scholar’s gardens in Suzhou, China. The aim of the journey was to explore these traditional gardens as models for physical movement, duration, flow and rhythm.

What particularly interests me about the scholar’s garden is its various temporal aspects: its creation, the cycle of changing seasons, but also the visitors’ physical movement through its convoluted and intricately linked spaces. What I find so inspiring is that these different notions of time passing are understood as co-producers of the garden.

When I entered, I saw the garden, but I also saw the limits of what I could see – I saw the construction of my own way of seeing things. I used the garden to reflect upon myself. It was gardening me, so to speak, and it was also gardening the body of Steen Koerner, the choreographer who was one of my companions that day. It directed his relatively minimal movements, as I gave choreographic input on an intuitive and emotional level. Steen was 'becoming' a garden, a tree or a rock, but was also becoming a user of the garden, of its conditions. This meant inverting our perspective – looking at the body as a result of the garden, not the other way around.

The film contains another, subtle layer: in addition to my friendship with Steen, I drew on the presence and great company of a landscape architect, a film director, a team from my studio, and a participant from the Institute for Spatial Experiments (a five-year school that I realised in collaboration with the Berlin University of the Arts). This group of people performed skills and social exchanges from which the recordings took shape, operating more like a workshop than a traditional film with a script. As an interconnected body, we read the garden landscape by moving through it. These resources still resonate in the film.


2013

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 11