blanco||gris

Flora

A little green paradise could be found at the end of McGill Street. And before you think about cycling paths along the island’s eastern shore, or a postal-card view from Old Montréal, or a the pleasant grey landscape of the Saint-Laurence river, you’ll have to turn your attention to the area that is under constant vigilance of a monstrous old freight warehouse.

In summer’s last whiff, a garden and landscape exhibition was held at the Jardin des Écluses du Vieux-Port de Montréal. A space of respiration and transpiration that welcomed a different experience of the green, and offered several of the best designers Canada and the world has to offer.

You had entered. The trees here are more than alive; they grow on thin air and devour the railings, becoming one with them. If they could, they could eat you alive as well. This is their territory now. In a world were vegetation is close to a hindrance and considered barely like tapestry, Flora is discovered as an Eden where the forbidden fruit adcquires many tastes, ranging from the overly organic to the plastic artificiality.

Plants open up to water, shrink to grass and arrange themselves into a perfect correspondence which brings you solemnity, perhaps a site for meditation. Through the openings on the red barrier, ghost of civilization stare at you relentlessly, declaring that you are part of the landscape; that in fact, you are the artifice in this scenario.

You walk further, peering down in disgrace, to enter more worlds of the green. Careful realities are molded into shapes that serve all purposes but ours. Elements dangle around the canvas of a simulated ecosystem where colors dance and taste float up in the air, unwilling to leave their constricting boundaries.

Stone, wood and synthetics are incorporated into the equation to provide a composition of memories that had never taken place in the city. Careful pads of green are placed aside hard grey, neon blue, neutral white, and shimmering metal. Geomorphic primitives arise carefully laid out grids and defy their creator. Green takes over, every time.

Even when perfectly simulated, the dense canopy of a forest can only exist but in the mind of beholder, where four simple steps towards the same direction awaken all sort of spirits and transformations. Suddenly bridges cross solid ground, ruins denote modernity, and praying becomes akin to staring at the eternal conflagration of colors and shapes and passions and scents and the living.

It becomes a resting ground for most of us. A place where path and point can be consolidated into a single element, and a place were awe and inspiration are traced to their genesis. Pavement is no longer a track but an option of being, as is the case when grass becomes water and water becomes ceiling and ceiling becomes a spherical entrapment of dead branches.

Now you are the onlooker, as trees move and shrubs flow, as arches twist around you and monuments are built from vegetative matter. Patterns arise, then, and circulate around you; vertically in textile form, horizontally through layers, and askew by means of fashionable gardened roofing.

It lets you play, too. Incorporating plastics as a nod to human intellect and innovation, but also laughing at its implications, the green welcomes artificiality as a prosthetic limb ready to face nature in the most ambivalent manner. It does this very consciously at times, but very often a by-product of design, site and imagination brings about a concert of events that make you lift an eyebrow.

Not unsure what to make of it, you end the journey. A little oasis of imps and fantasies, a series of gardening proposals for your lawn, a playful and lucid landscape to entertain your mind for a few weeks, a flipside to built architecture, an inverted Everest, a green experience.

International Flora Montréal 2006 took place from June 16 to October 9, 2006 at the Lock Gardens of the Old Port of Montréal

www.floramontreal.ca

# posted by claudio : 11:14 PM