The Spatial Design of Garden FuturesThe Spatial Design of Garden Futures

If you’re a design museum working on an exhibition about gardens, the question soon arises as to what you can and should allow yourself to do. Gardening as a practice of design and making has traditionally been about containing, enclosing and taming natural proliferation, and about human ideals imposed on other lives. An alternative, perhaps more positive, approach lies in the question that artist and designer Frank Bruggeman takes as the starting point for the spatial design of the Rotterdam edition of this touring exhibition: how to breathe life into the gardens on display?

The Milan-Rotterdam design studio Formafantasma, led by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, provided the spatial design for Garden Futures, which was shown in its original form in Weil am Rhein, Helsinki and Värnamo. Trimarchi, Farresin and their colleagues did their best to avoid clichéd notions of gardens as idealised nature and cultivated freedom. Instead, they drew on historic gardens that were designed as though they were indoor spaces. In many traditional Italian gardens, for example, the taming of the wilderness was made explicit by designing them as interiors.

Formafantasma echoed these paradoxical ideas about outside and inside, nature and culture, supposed civilisation and wilderness. The seats in the spaces were solidly upholstered, the walls and floors carpeted. The spatial design thus emphasised how the disciplines covered by the exhibition – gardening and garden and landscape design – have traditionally taken a human-centric starting point and stance.

In Rotterdam, the Nieuwe Instituut explicitly opts for a different type of space, largely dispensing with carpeting. Here, a wooden fence connects nature and culture, while walls made of scaffolding material emphasise the idea of the institute as an open and experimental testing ground.

The series of spaces in the exhibition is arranged to follow the chapters dividing the story of Garden Futures. From the paradisiacal Garden of Eden, the primordial garden, through gardening as a socio-political intervention and the garden as an actual testing ground, to the gardens of the future which look at issues such as how humans relate to other life forms in the Anthropocene and how to deal with global warming.

Nieuwe Instituut’s New Garden employs some remarkable gardeners. For years – and not only during Garden Futures – the garden has been ecologically managed by a writer and an artist. They know from experience what it means to garden for all life, including the other- or more-than-human. The institute invited artist and designer Frank Bruggeman to use this knowledge and expertise to reflect on the Rotterdam edition of Garden Futures. As assistant curator, he was involved in putting together the satellite presentation, Rotterdam – A Planetary Garden, with four best practices from the city. The institute also asked him to adapt the existing spatial design of the touring exhibition in its entirety to our building and working methods.

Bruggeman’s reinterpretation of Formafantasma’s original exhibition design is based on what he sees as a precarious balance. As humans, we have a certain image of nature as something distant, ‘out there’ – wild and separate from us. At the same time, we try to bend nature to our will through all kinds of interventions, so that it conforms to a longed-for ideal.

Bruggeman’s choice of materials reflects this contradiction. He contrasts living and dead plant material with materials that seem far from natural. This approach is consistent with his practice and oeuvre, in which he continuously explores the blurred distinction between nature and (botanical) culture. It is often difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. A landscape, for example, may appear to have formed spontaneously, when in fact it is entirely artificial. In his objects and installations, Bruggeman challenges outdated notions regarding the use of native or alien plants and questions the romantic pursuit of the purity or wholesomeness that people project onto nature.

The graphic layer of the exhibition Garden Futures and the design of the accompanying catalogue were developed by Lorenz Klingebiel and Dominik Krauss on behalf of the Vitra Design Museum. For the Rotterdam edition of the exhibition, Frédérique Gagnon, in collaboration with Maud Vervenne, adapted the existing concept to the local situation, including the additions, adaptations and translations which are unique to the Dutch edition of Garden Futures.