Gilles Clément
The garden in motion
Monday 4th of April 2011, 15.30
Aula del Magna del Rettorato, Piazza San Marco, 4 - Firenze

“I love the wilderness
because there is
nothing that has
to do with death”
G.Clément

Perhaps, no one studied green spaces surrounding us so deeply and at the same time so humbly as Gilles Clément did. Landscaper, engineer, agronomist, botanist and entomologist, Clément has been working for over twenty years on a project focused on his country house, where a journey began through what Clément likes to call planetary garden, within an analysis that often shows the limits of the traditional concepts of ecology.

Florens Foundation, after the success of the first edition of the International Week of Cultural and Environmental Heritage, in November 2010, continues its in-depth work, by presenting in Florence the lesson of a great intellectual of our time.
The topics treated by Clément are Florens’main objectives: to capture new visions, to start a debate on topics related to landscape culture and to analyse the struggle between civilisation and natural environment.
Tuscany and Florence, with the reference models which arose during the Renaissance, are the ideal place to deal with the landscape planetary evolution. Moreover, this seems to be the best time, also under a political point of view, in fact, new rules, aiming to find the balance among urban development, infrastructure enhancement and landscape protection, are under examination these months. This way, the poetic vision narrated by Clément also penetrates into the political debate of our time and opens a third way on a global scale.

A must for a gardener, as Clément likes to describe himself, is primarily to train the eye to capture what is both invisible and fundamental in the world of plants. In this sense, his latest book, The garden in motion (Quodlibet 2011) – whose preview will be presented in Florence - serves as a supplement to the Manifesto of the Third Landscape, complementing and enriching the ideas in a more extended and narrative form.

In Florence, Clément will explain in detail several cases to clarify what it means to embody a paradoxical idea, such as "garden in motion”, space in which nature is not subdued and suffocated by the bridles of a project, by a ready-made pattern, and where it is often better to know what not to do rather than intervening.
Then you learn the art of facilitating, promoting, encouraging, and while " changes game constantly modifies the design of the garden", the gardener, defined as the "guardian of the unpredictable”, and the visitor will be able to feed on the ever-present doses of surprise that nature gives when it expresses itself fully.

Therefore, it will not be surprising to read in his manifesto (which, as all manifestos, prefigures a vanguard not only of language but also of conduct) phrases such as "raising the indecision up to give it political dignity. Finding a balance between it and the power. Considering the lack of organisation as a vital principle, by which every organisation is passed through by the flashes of life. Approaching the diversity in amazement. Considering planetary mix - mechanical process related to the third landscape - as an engine of evolution. Presenting the third landscape, uncertain fragment of the planetary garden, not as an asset, but as a common space of the future. Raising unproductiveness up to give it political dignity. Protecting places characterised by popular belief as an essential territory for the wandering spirit. Comparing the hypothesis with other cultures of the planet, especially those cultures based on a fusion between man and nature. "

Pompidou Centre organised (October-December 2010) a series of meetings and seminars dedicated to Clément, involving not only landscapers, botanists, artists, but also economists and anthropologists in order to underscore the political strength of his worldview. It is no accident that some Clément’s texts are the basis of theoretical objections to the environmental policy of Sarkozy’s governments.

Gilles Clément (1943) is a professor at the “Ecole Nationale Superieure du Paysage de Versailles”, and a writer, who has influenced by his theories and works (among them: Parc André Citroën and Musée du quai Branly in Paris) a whole generation of European landscapers. He published: Le jardin planétaire (catalog of the exhibition at La Villette in Paris, 1999), La Sagesse du Jardinier (2004), two novels, Thomas et le voyageur (1997); La dernière pierre (1999). In Italy he published the anthology “Planetary Garden” (22 Publishing, 2008); Praise of wanderers (DeriveApprodi 2010) for Quodlibet: Manifesto to the Third landscape (2005) and The Garden in motion (2011).

"Plants travel. Herbs, especially. They move silently, like the winds. You cannot do anything against the wind. If you could reap the clouds, you would be surprised to collect unpredictable seeds mixed with loess, fertile dusts. Unbelievable landscapes take shape in the sky. It is an advantage for the evolution, not for the society. Even the humblest management project needs to schedule (to set, toclassify, etc.), but everything can change in an instant. How to maintain the landscape as a technocratic grid applied to the excesses of nature, to its violence? The total control project finds unexpected allies: radical ecologists and nostalgic people.
Nothing has to change, our past is at the stake; or, nothing has to change, biodiversity is at stake. Everyone against vagrancy! ", Gilles Clément writes.

“by Pino Brugellis and Sergio Risaliti”

Info: Lisa Cigolini - Fondazione Florens
e-mail:
T. + 39

Press office: Lucia Lunghini - Dorado Communications
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