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A Garden is domestic and unproductive: it’s neither a savannah (or tundra, or bush), nor a kitchen garden (or grain field, orchard, greenhouse). Not even a vacant land, which would indicate abandonment. It has to be taken care of and doesn’t promise anything in return, except for pleasure, which can be ruined by a simple hail or excessive water. The garden installs, in a rude space, a well-organized mini geography, slightly detached from nature. It hasn’t been created for human subsistence, but for delight. It is useless and coveted: the exact two characteristics that allow one who is not artistic to recognize an artwork.(1) To combine garden and artwork is a strategy that reminds us of at least three aspects: first and immediately, there is the experience of the artistic delight; then, there is the problematization of the museum as a vault; and finally, we notice the multidisciplinar practice inherent to the daily dedication demanded by the existence of the garden. Delight, joy, and beauty are words that come up during conversations with the visitors, together with a smile of curiosity. This is not unexpected: throughout History, these words have traditionally been associated with the human experience regarding landscape – but not with the recent artistic practice. Differently from “reality”, “surroundings” or “nature”, since it is deeper, more multiple and fictional, the landscape, temporarily intruding in the museum, materializes the landscape fiction, gives a beautiful shape to its cultural discourse, and approaches the spectator, unlocking the mausoleum-museum (2). A scent of fresh grass invades the hall and a new atmosphere modifies the temperature. Walking, sitting or lying down on the grass allow the dynamic and subjective practice of landscaping points of view, a problematic that has been incarnated by geographers, naturalists, travelers, and expeditioners for centuries. The visitors guide themselves with the intention of both exploring and resting. The combination of garden and artwork forcibly brings together different universes of thought. Crisscrossing of various fields of knowledge can take place within the garden-artwork. Nature and culture come closer, as well as indoors and unexpected outdoors, artist and scientist, assembly team, termites, ticks and capybaras. A certain scientism overhangs the exhibit, but in an astonishing way: creating a scientific language that can be freely and directly accessed, rather than a dialect that is merely accessible, allowing an immediate experience of fascination and adherence. Eduardo Coimbra’s work offers an in situ formulation of knowledge concerning the landscape concept. What interests here is not only the artistic and critical formalization of the geographic theory, but also the exchange of such knowledge. The strategy is simple, for it is direct, but it demands time, a specific and inexact time, more or less predictable, slight manageable. After forty days of careful cultivation on the land in front of the Museum, our crossings can take place on the design-grass, and are performed by curious and hedonistic visitors who accept the invitation to experiment the sensorial condition of a domesticated nature. The “don’t step on the grass” hypocritical simulacrum of environmental preservation is sweetly inverted, together with the “do not touch”, the “do not sit”, etc. Touching the grass means to be sensorially reminded of the existence of nature: in times of real estate speculation and never-ending sealing of cities, believe me, it is really worth it to feel a grass lawn... In the exhibit Museum:observatory, the contemplation activity is less passive and more complex. It becomes clear that to face the landscape means to deal with the consequences of such involvement. The creation, maturation and production process of Eduardo Coimbra’s exhibit in the Pampulha Art Museum puts all the involved in contact with the animal and vegetal world diversities. It is a testing ground that expands the Museum to other fields, unfolds its activities and technical knowledge towards foreign lands, engages specialists from other areas. The uncertainty of the results, as well as the constant threat of unforeseeable circumstances, requires a multiplicity of vocabularies and practices. From the enemies that must be fought (termites and ticks) to the friendly inhabitants of the area (capybaras), the museum action scope is wide open. The garden-artwork presents itself as a living picture that must efficiently put to work a secret microcosm, instead of human actors, to constitute the live image. The soil preparation, the cutting of the grass blocks, the solution to the fabrication of the green pixels (the grass cups, according to Eduardo), the planting of thousands of small plastic cups, and the need for gardeners’ care bring new challenges daily. To reach field capacity, to pulverize manure, to apply insecticide, to sprinkle water, to refresh the grass, to trim it, to check for curled up leaves (sign of lack of water), to keep termites from devouring the artwork, to protect us all against the ticks, which were abundant at the time. And to attentively watch the presence of the growing and hungry capybara family, which is fed with emerald grass or zoysia japonica, one of the most resistant to stomping. This laboratory-situation reflects well the notion of the Museum:observatory. Transposed into the museum, the lawn finds itself in a controlled environment, completely scientific, naturally artistic. This place incites the garden contemplation and the artwork contemplation, proving that – yes, just like an empirical study! – this is not a passive act, but rather a result of each one’s individual performance. While the landscape is a creation of beings who can see, it is, however, a meta-optical unfolding of the retina, not only an ability of those who see, but an instrument of those who imagine. The landscape is also a spatial project. Seeing and imagining form a combination that is part of the sight’s mental platform. The exhibit shows us that the landscape doesn’t consist of a simple capture of an exteriority by the senses, but rather of an intimate formulation. While the perspective has established a machine for observing the landscape, and the creation of a bond between things, the Museum:observatory promotes the tension between in situ and in visu, place-landscape and language-landscape. From the top of historic observatories, we can see the surroundings, map them, measuring, isolating and classifying them so they can be decoded – and at the same time, coded. Our language codes derive from the observation exercise: according to Julio Cortázar, in a visit to the Jaipur observatory, it is “[…] the migration of a verb: discourse, course, the Atlantic eels and the eel words […]”(3). The observatory is built on the desire of positioning itself in the world, verbalizing it (or mathematizing it), transforming sight into phenomenon, phenomenon into sign (“eel words”: always migratory scientific beings). At first, observing requires a certain ascension, and then, it asks for internalization. The observatory is defined as a spatial structure that tries to bring sight and knowledge together. It embraces the immediate act of seeing, and, simultaneously, the long effort to study and to name. Through this process, the external place is inserted into the internal one. “To observe is not to look, but to look, listen and take notes; to isolate, to build a lab within the sight and to identify the keys to our relationship with the physical world”(4), as Iñaki Ábalos emphasized. The uniqueness of the Pampulha Art Museum’s building, located on the highest part of the artificial dam’s shore, benefited its role as an observatory. Since its pre-history as a casino, the museum has never detached itself from its supplementary landscape. Its translucent limits, the architectural stroll granted by the modern project and its insertion in Roberto Burle Marx’s landscape have always potentialized this sight laboratory. But in the Museum:observatory this potential is amplified, evidenced and problematized: the role of the building becomes ambiguous while its limits are scratched out. The association of the word museum and the word observatory suggests the transmutation of the Museum into something new. It is almost an accumulation of apparently contradictory roles, but only apparently. “The observatory is both a physical and a mental place: a typology and a fantasy from which we can start to draw new atlases”(5). And here science and art can be found, in the exact point of constant doubt and of the investigative, self-conscious, proposing contemplation. The challenge is to be capable of seeing this dynamics and to write it in new languages, updating the verbal speech and reinventing environmental practices. Within its gaps, the garden-museum seems to engage in a dialog with the modernist garden-terrace. Both spaces ideally re-found the notion of collectivity among people, and the yet punctual establishment of the coexistence of nature and city. However, the artifice is the strategy adopted in both cases. In fact, we can see that the grass in the Museum is more of an artifice than it is nature, more design than decontrol, more architecture than woods. The lawn is the homogeneous, plastic and civilized nature, as a rug that can be touched and used as a surface, even though it is made of the materiality of that which it represents. It is a nomadic artifice (for it can be reinstalled) able to transform each space and its perspectives. The artifice is present in the Museum as nature’s inseparable double. The reflexive trait of the shallow pool, a classical resource in the constitution of picturesque landscapes and in modern projects, returns in the form of mirrors installed on the Mezzanine. And the ability of transporting things or landscapes from a place to another, inherent of any mirror, suddenly unbalances the site’s tectonics. As a utopia or heterotopia, the landscape becomes a critical image, dematerializing itself right on the spot. After all, the mirror is a utopia, since it is a place without a place. In the mirror, I see myself right there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space, open on the other side of the surface; I am beyond, there where I am not, I am a shadow that makes me visible to myself, that allows me to see me where I am absent. This is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia, since the mirror exists in reality and exerts a kind of counteraction to the position that I occupy. […] From this look directed to me, from the bottom of this virtual space on the other side of the mirror, I return to myself: I look at me and start to rebuild me where I am. The mirror works as a heterotopia in this momentum: it transforms the place I occupy when I see myself in the mirror into a space that is real for a moment, associated with all the space around it, and absolutely unreal […].(6) The transparence of the pivoting windows, through which the landscape could easily be found, is totally replaced by virtual plans of mirrors, capable of exercising the utopian displacement, and, at the same time, the heterotopian questioning. According to Foucault, while the utopias bring comfort, the heterotopias bring unrest (7). An unquiet, yet subtle space, even ludic to an extent, is formed. There, the materials and the landscape reappear as flying signs that let the space play the main role in the theme to be observed, inseparable from the observer. To stay or to run away? To desire or to transform? Focus or mirage? Heterotopian abysms are built on the edges of the glass curtains (or devices for seeing safely and comfortably). The abysms work as a kind of barrier, not allowing one to look at the landscape passively. The visitor has the chance to experiment a foreign look as a traveler who discovers new sites: it is the proposal of the game of recognition or rediscovery of the place being occupied at that moment. Phantasmagories of this place are produced, showing once more that the landscape is less matter than it is idea, less nature than artifice, a cultural fact inherited and reproduced. The game tables that used to occupy the Mezzanine at the time when the building was a casino, before gambling was forbidden in Brazil in 1946, hunt the benches. Not leaving behind any photographic trait, such occupation has only been reported by witnesses: it is known that there have been round tables on one side of the Mezzanine, which were used for playing cards, and rectangular tables on the other side, where the roulettes were placed. This information has inspired the shape of the objects that emerge from the floor, made of their own materiality: wooden parquetry and mirrors. Phantasmagories appear in the shape of (re)utility objects that fragmentarily multiply the place. Memory games (this image creation device) are reverted into new possible sociabilities – from tables that have disappeared to benches for the visitors. In this case, the artworks are naturalized in our visual field as almost invisible. This is how the intervention presents itself to the attentive ones: completely camouflaged. The image-landscape comes in the Museum through the camouflage exercise. Disguising itself in the space, hiding, replacing here its presence elsewhere, replicating itself, reflecting the events that happen within it, it offers two more proposals of in situ experience, apart from the lawn, concerning its geographic definition. On the one hand, the landscape moves along the building, as we’ve seen, transformed by mobile devices – benches, manipulatable windows and planned casing splinters, disposed on the only opaque wall or on the floor – disguising the surfaces and problematizing its own existence. On the other hand, the landscape restores itself with a set of photographic images that replace the visor-windows and capture dynamic moments of gazing sights. In this case, the perception itself is being photographed: all the flatness thought to be part of the landscape is spectacularly replaced by the space experimented by the body in a succession of moments. On the auditorium round shape, a sort of diorama is set with these images, replicating the panoramic situation of the place. The diorama, Louis Daguerre’s term that etymologically means to see through, became popular as an exhibit style, specially in Natural History museums in the late 19th and early 20th century. It has the illusionist characteristic of the immersion, the act of travelling without moving. It is a display aimed at stimulating perception, memory, and the obligatory experience of belonging to the landscape. If there is no landscape, if there is no one to see it – and here we have to disagree with Milton Santos in what regards the landscape definition -, we have the opportunity to see ourselves as a diorama: a totally immersive and extremely provocative environment. With images that are identical to the landscape seen outside, powerful backlights reproduce views of this landscape coinciding with the outdoors. But the images appear in pairs, a series of four pairs - the view seen from inside and the double of what is seen on the other side of the lake, captured at the same time. This image partnership gives volume, depth, and temporariness to the landscape representation. The portrayed moment of the dynamics of the perceiving act builds an emptiness where the eyes wander, where the one who sees finds what isn’t seen, on a magnetic hiatus lost somewhere along the itinerary of the photographers who took part in the production of this work, on September 15th 2011. One day before, the shore had been mapped: red poles had been put by the artists on the exact points meant for the reciprocal observation – from the pavement of the Museum’s Auditorium, and the other side corresponding to the view from the Auditorium, on Pampulha’s lake shore. The hundreds of fluorescent lamps set behind the printed canvas and their publicity image appeal are not deceiving: the familiarity of a billboard is quickly reverted into the strangeness of the indoors. There starts a game of image analysis and search, just like on Google Earth Street View; the photographers records from their simultaneous observation points can be discovered, just a few minutes later, due to the images’ printing scale; and the flat image, in pairs, has a spatial complexity that expands it and, because of the improbable perspectives, makes it more visible than the landscape that could be seen through those windows, before and since the beginning, decades ago. They are temporarily blind windows that allow the new typology experience of the Museum:observatory. 2011 obs: text written for the catalog of the Museu:observatório (Museum:observatory) exhibition, held at Museu da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, MG, in November 2011 notes: |