Guillaume Viaud, Walking Piece, 2008. Courtesy de l'artiste
David Fathi, Wolfgang, 2015-2016
Henk Wildschut, de la série Rooted, 2018
Lara Almarcegui, Construire mon jardin ouvrier. Rotterdam, 1999-2002. Courtesy de l'artiste
Lorenzo Vitturi, Red Cotisso, Green Pigment, Wood in Arìn, Caminantes, 2019
Kim Boske, Untitled Flower, 2013
Nicolas Daubanes, Paysage en coupe, 2019. Courtesy galerie Florent Maubert, Paris
Lucas Foglia, Jonathan Holding Pruning Shears, GreenHouse Program, Rikers Island Jail Complex, New York. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
Adrien Missika, Cura, 2019
Diana Scherer, Rootbound#1, 2018

NOTRE JARDIN

May 25 to September 28, 2019

“Notre jardin” (our garden) is that plot of land inscribed in a soil, in oneself or in the collective, where we cultivate the cultural, ethical and civic virtues that save reality from its worst impulses.”
In his now classic essay Gardens, Reflections on the Human Condition, American author Robert Harrison appeals to Voltaire’s Candide and to that ambitious and vast collective territory contained by that single possessive pronoun: our. The present exhibition considers the garden as a place to rethink and experiment, like a relational laboratory, with relationships to oneself and to time, to others and to society. If there is a space that can escape the consumerist logic and the individualism it propagates, the perimeter of the garden, whether imaginary, abandoned, or working-class, hosts it.

To the contemplation often required, the artists gathered here oppose the act. Henk Wildschut documents the gardens cultivated at the foot of tents in a refugee camp in the Jordanian desert, while Lucas Foglia bears witness to the strange neighborhood between the Rikers Island prison and the gardens of the New York Horticultural Society. Lara Almarcegui, Nicolas Daubanes and Adrien Missika are busy planting and maintaining, respectively, a worker’s garden in Rotterdam, eucalyptus seeds from a land of trauma and some forgotten plants from Mexico City’s road interchanges. Kim Boske and Guillaume Viaud use digital retouching or a cube of mirrors carried by the artist to find their personal path within gardens that they recompose through images, while Diana Scherer, like the gardener cultivating the earth before making the flower grow, pursues a work conceived with the active collaboration of roots. Throughout these works, it is the gesture, the one that makes the interstice its own in order to install the culture and take care of it, that of the gardener, and following him, of the artist that unfolds within the perimeter of Notre Jardin, Our Garden.

With works by Lara Almarcegui, Kim Boske, Nicolas Daubanes, Lucas Foglia, Adrien Missika, Diana Scherer, Guillaume Viaud, Henk Wildschut.

From July 13 to August 11, 2019, the Centre photographique Rouen Normandie presents at the pavilion of the Jardin des Plantes in Rouen, L’École buissonnière, a group exhibition retracing the artist residencies of Marion Dutoit, Delphine Burtin and Diana Scherer in schools. Conducted during 2019 in agricultural and horticultural high schools or around an urban square, these residencies all three deal with the territory and our way of living in it.

Around the exhibition

OPENING
Friday May 24th, from 6pm
in the presence of the artists

GUIDED TOURS
Saturday May 25, 11am
in the presence of the artists

Saturday July 13, 4pm
followed by a visit of the exhibition outside the walls
L’École buissonnière, pavilion of the Jardin des Plantes, Rouen, 5pm
dubbed in sign language by Liesse

MEETING
Saturday September 7th, 5pm
with Ryoko Sekiguchi, writer

WORKSHOPS 7/11 YEARS OLD
Wednesday, June 26, 2:30 pm
Fantastic gardens, in partnership with Rn’Bi

Sunday September 15, 3pm
Straight and leaning, with Sophie Grassart (Tigre)

FINISHING
Saturday September 28th
Meeting / Signature with Henk Wildschut, 4pm
Lecture by Jacques Leenhardt, philosopher and sociologist, 5pm