Introduction

The exhibition Infinite Garden, From Giverny to Amazonia depicts nature in the perspective of a metaphorical spring. Germination, blossoming and degeneration suggest the cycles of Earth, where the winter stop is the promise for future revolutions.

Fertile ground of forms, the garden inspires artists with morphologies and fantastic metamorphoses revealing the intelligence of a nonhuman world. The explorations of the Earth lead to the ends of the known nature towards unspoiled territories that become new reserves of forms and motifs. Thus, fantasizing the exotic nature, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster creates a tropical diorama, Mangrovama, 2017, a proliferating garden-library in line with a series of installations inspired from an illusionist’s devices of the 19th century. The Brazilian Ernesto Neto takes the Forum of the Centre Pompidou-Metz with a monumental sculpture, Leviathan-Main-Toth (2005), whose membranes take the shape of a biological landscape on a building scale.

The garden is also the place of genetic bifurcation which alters determinisms in favor of evolution. Claude Monet creates hybrids and gets plants from all over the world, triggering the ire of the local farmers who fear poisoning by these foreign flowers. A century later, Pierre Huyghe creates “condensates of Giverny” in Nymphéas Transplant (14-18), 2014, a climate-programmed aquarium. If acclimation awakes the naturalists’ curiosity, it also serves the interest of a “botanic of power”, working on the colonization then the eradication of “green pests”. Beyond the exoticism, the tropical and biomorphic alternatives of Roberto Burle-Marx or Lina Bo Bardi in Latin America and in Brazil revivify the functionalism of the European modernity.

At a time of intense intermixing, melting pot and migration phenomena which constantly reconfigure the biodiversity, the original fence of the garden, being material or conceptual, needs to be revaluated. The exhibition takes the garden out of itself, going beyond the dialectic on which Michel Foucault had articulated during his conference “Of Other Spaces” in 1967, his heterotypic definition of the garden as “the smallest parcel of the world” and as the “totality of the world.”

For Infinite Garden, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané has created a landscape scenery over two floors of the museum, encompassing the works of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (Mangrovama, 2017), Pierre Huyghe (Nymphéas Transplant (14-18), 2014) and Philippe Parreno (the series C.H.Z., 2011), among others, in a comprehensive environment. The architecture of the exhibition breaks with the usual codes of neutral museum space to become a vast garden, where the visitor is invited to wander throughout curved metallic curtains, while the straw-like carpet that covers the second floor subtly increases in height from one end to another.

Imagined like a territory without borders, the exhibition expands to the city of Metz through different gardens set up by the artists Peter Hutchinson, François Martig and Loïs Weinberger.