Panoptic Garden

Proposal for a contemporary garden submitted to the 28th edition of the International Garden Festival, entitled “Making Visible(s): Alternative Geographies”.

Pine forestry reveals conflicting tensions between the preservation of landscapes and their biodiversity, and the demands of forest exploitation. Its intensive monoculture follows a logic of mass production designed to meet the many uses of wood. At the same time, pine plays a central role in controversial reforestation strategies. Although some pine species are highly flammable, they have a rapid capacity for regeneration, revealing the ambivalent relationship between pine and environmental disturbances. Both an exploited resource and an element of heritage, pine embodies the tensions between economic value and the preservation of living things.

The installation translates these tensions to the scale of a garden. A pine cabin encloses a forest made up of seedlings of the same species. At its centre, a raised platform allows visitors to look down over the young plants, evoking a panoptic gaze upon the living world. Visitors thus move beyond the boundaries of the enclosure and also discover the spruce trees in the Jardins de Métis. The installation brings together several scales, from seedlings to the landscape, and questions the ways in which humans organise, exploit and stage the plant world.