rahelhegnauer

Temporary Garden - Paris, France, 2006

*deutsch*

While walking along a hedge, a fence or a wall one wonders what might be on the other side, what is hiding there. The garden in the European and Oriental perception a symbol of paradise, it is also a place of imagination and secrets. The empty plots between the houses reflect the state of the district: Changes, transformation, to build up, to live in, to abandon. Between the old and the new house one moment of reflection. The gap between „before – after“, the garden itself always in transition gives to the site a temporarily other meaning.

Background: On my walks during my first visits through the 18th arrondissement – specially La Goutte d’Or – it struck me how few spare spaces were left. There were not many undefined sites like a neglected parc or an abandoned parking lot. The district (La Goutte d’Or) is structured by narrow streets with narrow pavements which branch out like rays from smalls squares. The old multistoried apartment houses are high and built all along the streets without interruption except the gaps where a house has been pulled down and the construction of a new one has not yet been started. Of these gaps there were quite a few, but they were all fenced off towards the street. Why not open one and make it accessible to the public? Temporarily?

From my starting point – small budget, no permission from the municipality to open a lot at that time and also I hardly knew anybody then – the project developed to a garden which was not only green but also became a place where the neighbourhood met and discussions took place. The seemingly harmless project a temporary garden became a challenge for the people and the local politicians to think about urban space, about the boundaries between private and public space. In that way the project stepped also onto social and political grounds.
The moment the abandoned plot became a garden the space turned into a place of identity and action. Marc Augé called it an anthropological site: defined by identity, history (narratives) and relation ¹ – in contrast to the non-site: places of transit, shopping malls, vehicles, holiday resorts, ... ²
The garden as a realised utopia – a heterotopia - is a real place which at the same time refers to other places (Michel Foucault). ³
He considers the garden as one of the oldest heterotopias. The garden in the Orient has multilayered meanings: the traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred site. It symbolises paradise (the word: paradise derives from the persian word: paridaeza = walled garden) which was partitioned by four rivers in four rectangles which represented the four parts of the world (north, south, east, west). In the middle was the most sacred space where the navel of the world was situated (represented by a pond and a fountain). All the vegetation had to find its place in the garden which in its composition reaches a symbolic perfection of the world. (Carpets were originally reproductions of gardens, a kind of mobile gardens.) ⁴

After a long time of preparation and waiting to get the permission (from autumn 2005 – summer 2006) the garden could only start in summer – not how it was originally planned in spring – and lasted only for 3 months. So instead of using seeds we had to plant saplings.

Addendum: The small community of „gardeners“ liked the idea of having a garden in their neighbourhood so much that they applied for another site at the municipality. There they continued the Jardin temporaire with a new name: La Goutte verte – green drop.