The New Garden, as seen by Maxim Lambers
With the redevelopment of the Museum Park, the green outdoor space surrounding Het Nieuwe Instituut is set to change. The institute has invited a number of artists to respond to the ecological recovery of The New Garden and the relationships between the greenery and garden residents and visitors. Photographer and filmmaker Maxim Lambers takes on the second assignment with a series of images of the autumn sky above The New Garden.
2 December 2022
At first glance, The New Garden is not 'beautiful', at least not in a conventional sense. But why should an outdoor space be beautiful? And for whom? The people who occasionally walk through it? Maxim Lambers discussed the project with artist Frank Bruggeman, who was responsible for the design of the garden as it looked in the 2015-2021 period. They talked about the paradoxical beauty of The New Garden. The garden was intended as an urban place that would be arranged according to ecological principles. It had to be a suitable habitat for Rotterdam's flora and fauna, with space for rewilding. A successful, or 'beautiful,' garden design is therefore not so much about the aesthetic expectations of human users or visitors. It's about ecological, other-than-human needs. During the month of October, Lambers translated this dichotomy into a series of photos of the sky above the garden. The photographer sees the autumnal cloudy skies as a metaphor for the invisible beauty of an ecologically responsible garden, because both take on shifting forms and are oblivious to the human gaze.
The open-minded experience of the autumn skies above The New Garden fits in with Maxim Lambers' (@maxim.lambers) approach to his photography and cinematography as 'phenomenological exercises'. He turns a photo or film location such as the garden into an arena of observation in which the obvious historical (or in this case, human aesthetic) context no longer plays a role. Lambers studied film and photography at the St Joost School of Art and Design in Breda and followed a minor in film at the KASK & Conservatorium School of Arts in Ghent. A video work he made during the coronavirus pandemic was shown at Big Art 2022. See more on Lambers' website.